I’m back on the CCS soapbox because Wirral Reform Doge (yes, the meme lives) is still fighting ENI’s plan to turn Liverpool Bay into a carbon landfill. I promise not to dine out on this forever, but nothing exposes the comic flaws of our political plumbing quite like an active campaign. Think of this post as a field report: the facts are linked, the sarcasm is free-range, and any poetic licence taken is purely to keep you awake. If you’d rather see the council’s unedited theatrics, the full webcast is here .
Find out more—join the fray—at liverpoolbay.com
Please give me some feedback, whats your comments, thoughts?
PART 1
I’m polishing my best “concerned-resident” grimace for tonight’s Environment & Climate Emergency Committee. That’s the one that says “I’m not angry, councillor – just profoundly under-whelmed.” Armed with a question longer than most council agendas (and, frankly, better researched), I’ll be asking why Wirral seems perfectly happy to play toxic post-box for ENI’s Liverpool Bay Carbon Capture & Storage wheeze. Wish me luck – they only allow five minutes for public questions, which is roughly how long ENI takes to deny responsibility when a pipeline springs a leak.
Carbon Capture & Storage – or CCS if you’re feeling optimistic – is sold as the climate equivalent of shoving the dirty laundry under the bed and hoping your mum never looks. In theory, you trap CO₂ at the factory gate, squash it into a pipeline and bury it in a handy geological hole where, allegedly, it will stay put forever. gov.uk. In practice the CO₂ isn’t textbook-pure: it drags along a cocktail of hydrogen sulphide, mercury, sulphur oxides and assorted industrial dandruff that can corrode steel, acidify seawater and make geologists reach for the antacids. Think “SodaStream for Hell” and you’re on the right track. sciencedirect, publication
Which brings us to ENI’s plan. The Italian super-major wants to ram up to 200 million tonnes of this chemically spiky CO₂ under the Hamilton spent-gas field in Liverpool Bay – roughly one third of all the carbon the UK emitted last year, now gift-wrapped for our seabed. ENI.com. Phase-one alone aims for 4.5 million tonnes a year, scaling to 10 Mt by the 2030s; apparently the dolphins didn’t get a vote. Back on land, Wirral councillors did vote – in 2022 they nodded along to the HyNet-branded sales pitch and recorded their support in the minutes, with later meetings politely “noting” public concern while doing precisely nothing. Tonight I plan to remind them that “not our jurisdiction, guv” won’t look classy when the Irish Sea starts belching rotten-egg CO₂. wirral.gov.
PART 2
I rolled up to Wallasey Town Hall at 17:45, proudly sporting my Reform badge and the faint hope that someone—anyone—inside still owned a spine. Instead, I was herded into a holding pen outside Committee Room 1, where we waited.
At 18:00 the cameras blinked red and the ceremonial shuffling began. The Chair reminded us the meeting would be streamed “for transparency.” (Because nothing screams open democracy like warning the public not to show their faces in… a public meeting.). We opened with the public questions. I was second up for public questions, clutching my war-and-peace-length CCS query like a contestant on Mastermind. I delivered it word-for-word—sulphides, mercury, the lot—then braced for enlightenment. Cue tumbleweed: the chair muttered something about “complexities” and punted the whole thing upstairs to the Liverpool City Region, where awkward questions go to die. Apparently the identical council that rubber-stamped the scheme in 2022 now finds it “above their pay-grade.” Funny how due diligence becomes a spectator sport once the vote’s safely in the rear-view mirror.
I pressed: could they at least elevate the matter to full council? The chair consulted invisible lawyers in her head and decided they’d need “legal advice” first. Translation: we’d rather eat committee papers than debate this in public.
The rest of the agenda played like municipal improv comedy. One department defended a chunky overspend by claiming that “new legislation landed part-way through the project.” Which is rich, considering every council receives statutory bulletins months in advance precisely so they can update their risk registers. Ignoring those alerts, then acting surprised when the law changes, is like bin-men claiming they didn’t see the calendar. Yet not a single committee member asked why the impact-assessment process—supposed to flag legal shifts before the ink dries—failed so completely. They just nodded, checked their watches and moved on.
Then came the pièce de résistance: Wirral has commissioned an “independent review” of its controversial pop-up cycle lanes… from Mott MacDonald. Yes, the same Mott MacDonald that designed the lanes in the first place. Asking them to mark their own homework is the sort of conflict-of-interest masterstroke that would make FIFA blush.
Radio Merseyside’s ‘Hotseat’ at noon? If the host mentioned Liverpool Bay CCS, I must have blinked and missed it—though given today’s showing, perhaps the silence was merciful.
Oh, and before I escape the municipal labyrinth, a bonus vignette from the procedural Twilight Zone: midway through the session the chair casually announced they’d be taking Item 7 before Item 5. That required an actual vote to bless the reshuffle, thi was to avoid the need to summon a with a grim‐faced solicitor to confirm that democracy wouldn’t fissure in two if they strayed from the printed running order.
The chair assured us this off-piste sequencing is now “best practice” and happens all the time. Splendid. So why not, I don’t know, publish the agenda in the order you intend to follow and spare everyone the pantomime? Instead we spent five whole minutes proving we’re so welded to bureaucratic choreography that even minor improvisations must be chaperoned by legal counsel. If common sense were carbon, the council could capture it and still hit net-zero.