The Peak Cluster project is being promoted as a flagship carbon capture and storage scheme. In simple terms, it involves transporting carbon dioxide from heavy industry in the Peak District through a long underground pipeline to Merseyside, where it would be stored offshore beneath the Irish Sea.
Supporters frame are framing it as a necessary step towards Net Zero.
But for the people of Cheshire, a basic question remains unanswered: what do we actually get out of this?
The pipeline does not decarbonise Cheshire businesses. It does not materially reduce emissions from local industry and it does not exist to support our economy. Cheshire’s role is largely that of a corridor, absorbing disruption, land use impacts and long-term risk so that carbon produced elsewhere can be transported and stored somewhere else.
Major infrastructure projects should not be waved through simply because they wear a Net Zero badge. They must deliver clear local benefit and have local consent. At the moment, Cheshire is being asked to shoulder the disruption while others take the credit.
This matters even more in the context of Net Zero itself. I am a pragmatist. Nobody can seriously argue against protecting the environment, but climate policy must be rooted in reality. It should never come at the expense of jobs, businesses or economic stability.
Carbon capture may have a role to play in decarbonising genuinely hard-to-abate industries. But projects like this must pass a simple test: do they deliver real value to the communities they pass through? Do they protect jobs locally? Do they strengthen, rather than weaken the economy?
Right now, the case for Cheshire is thin. The costs are tangible: years of disruption, uncertainty for landowners and farmers, and permanent underground infrastructure. The benefits, by contrast, are abstract and largely accrue elsewhere.
There is also a serious democratic problem. Too often, projects of this scale are classified as nationally significant, with consultation treated as a procedural hurdle rather than a meaningful decision point. When people feel decisions are stitched up in Whitehall before locals have been heard, trust collapses.
If a pipeline is going to run through our countryside, beneath our land and past our communities for decades to come, then local people should have more than a chance to submit comments. They should have a real say on whether it proceeds at all.
The sensible response is not to bulldoze ahead in the name of climate targets, but to pause, go back to the drawing board, and make the local case properly. If the benefits to Cheshire cannot be clearly demonstrated, that should matter.
Net Zero must work with communities, not be done to them. Democracy should come first, even when some think it is inconvenient.
