Cogent Skills counted 700 full time CCUS employees in the UK in 2021. The CCS Task and Finish Group expects up to 15,000 direct CCS roles in a single peak year by 2030. Four disciplines account for most of that gap, and all four are already committed elsewhere.
Key Takeaways
- The UK had 700 full time CCUS employees in 2021, up from 300 in 2014, according to Cogent Skills. The CCS Task and Finish Group projects up to 15,000 direct CCS roles in a peak year by 2030, with 2,500 to 3,000 in transport and storage alone.
- £21.7bn over 25 years is committed to the first five Track-1 projects, and the June 2025 Spending Review added £9.4bn of CCUS capital through to 2029/30. The money is settled, so hiring risk now sits in delivery rather than policy.
- DESNZ conceded in December 2024 that the 20 to 30 Mtpa by 2030 target was no longer achievable. Track-1’s eight shortlisted projects capture 4.9 Mtpa between them.
- The four roles are CO2 capture process and commissioning engineer, subsurface storage geoscientist, dense-phase CO2 pipeline and integrity specialist, and CCUS HSE and regulatory specialist.
- Robert Gordon University puts over 90% of the UK oil and gas workforce at medium to high skills transferability. But oil and gas employment fell from about 120,000 to 115,000 between 2023 and 2024 while renewables rose from 34,000 to 39,000, so CCUS bids for people offshore wind is already hiring.
Why the Specialist Base Is So Small
Carbon capture in the UK went from policy ambition to funded construction faster than the workforce could follow. Cogent Skills recorded the entire UK CCUS workforce at 300 full time employees in 2014 and 700 by 2021. That is the pool holding genuine CCUS-specific experience, and it is the number every commissioning team in the country is drawing from.
What sits on top of it is substantial. The government committed £21.7bn over 25 years in October 2024 for the first five Track-1 projects, of which £3.9bn is spent in 2025/26 according to UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Resources, citing the Autumn Budget 2025. The June 2025 Spending Review added £9.4bn of CCUS capital through to 2029/30. The Public Accounts Committee notes in its report that “a quarter of this financial support will come from the Exchequer, but three quarters will come from levies on consumers who are already facing some of the highest energy bills in the world”, and records recognised contingent liabilities with a maximum of £34.4bn against a reasonable worst case of £14.3bn.
Delivery has already been scaled back once. In December 2024 DESNZ conceded that the 20 to 30 Mtpa by 2030 target was no longer achievable, and the Public Accounts Committee records Track-1’s eight shortlisted projects capturing only 4.9 Mtpa between them. That matters for hiring because it did not reduce the number of distinct teams needing the same specialists, only the tonnage they will capture.
Justine Fosh, Chief Executive of Cogent Skills, framed the problem for The Engineer around the Greenprint report. “While there is no clear plan to develop a workforce to support future CCUS facilities, the sector is under pressure to meet the ambition of capturing 20-30Mt of CO2 per year by 2030,” she said.
The project sequence is what turns a small pool into a bottleneck. Eni’s Liverpool Bay transport and storage reached final investment decision in April 2025 at 4.5 Mtpa in its initial phase, and DESNZ guidance puts HyNet’s initial transport and storage capacity at around 4.5 Mtpa from about 2027. Net Zero Teesside Power at 2 Mtpa and the Northern Endurance Partnership at 4 Mtpa initial capacity both took FID in December 2024, with operations expected from 2028. Heidelberg Materials Padeswood cement at 800,000 tpa and Encyclis Protos energy from waste at 370,000 tpa reached financial close in September 2025, with first operations from 2029. Acorn and Viking carry FIDs due later this Parliament, meaning by 2029.
So 2027 is the first year a UK transport and storage network is expected to be handling CO2 while four more capture projects are in construction and two Track-2 clusters are heading into FID. The HyNet Project Negotiation List alone now holds ten capture projects.
The Four Roles UK Projects Cannot Fill
A note on pay before the roles. No UK advertised salaries exist for any of these four disciplines in CCUS specifically. Every figure below is a labelled proxy from Airswift’s Global Energy Talent Index 2026, which reports European oil and gas contractor day rates in US dollars, or from a live adjacent UK contract. They indicate the market a CCUS employer is bidding into rather than what CCUS itself pays. The method for building a defensible band where no published data exists is set out in how benchmarking works when the published data runs out.
Which capture engineers can commission a plant at this scale?
The CO2 capture process and commissioning engineer designs, commissions and optimises solvent-based capture units, usually amine post-combustion. It is the hardest of the four to fill because the reference plants do not exist. The Public Accounts Committee, quoted by The Telegraph in 2025, warns that “one of the UK emitter projects is planning to build a gas-fired power station with carbon capture, but this would be 40 times larger than any existing examples globally”.
Almost nobody has commissioned at that scale anywhere. The transferable pool sits in refining, gas processing and chemicals, where solvent systems and process commissioning are routine even though CO2 capture is not. Airswift puts the European oil and gas commissioning engineer day rate at $1,139 in 2026, and Ganymede advertised a UK contract process instrumentation engineer in Stockton-on-Tees at £55 per hour outside IR35. Those are the rates a CCUS project competes against.
Where do the storage geoscientists come from?
The subsurface storage geoscientist and reservoir engineer characterises saline aquifers and depleted fields, plans monitoring and supports storage permits such as the one covering the Endurance store. Acorn, Viking, Endurance and Liverpool Bay all need this capability at the same time, and the people who hold it are still in oil and gas, which employed about 115,000 in 2024.
Retraining is narrower than it sounds. The core skills carry across directly, and what has to be added is CO2 plume modelling and measurement, monitoring and verification. Airswift’s European oil and gas average of $808 per day is the closest published benchmark.
Who can design a dense-phase CO2 pipeline?
The CO2 compression, dense-phase pipeline and integrity specialist designs and operates high pressure CO2 systems. Liverpool Bay reuses existing pipelines and Viking’s onshore pipeline sits under its Development Consent Order, so both routes demand this discipline rather than generic pipeline engineering.
Dense-phase CO2 does not behave like natural gas. Fracture propagation and impurity effects differ materially, and only four transport and storage networks exist across the entire UK pipeline, so there is no large body of UK operating experience to recruit from. Gas transmission and North Sea pipelines are the source sectors. Airswift’s European electrical engineer figure of $860 per day is an imperfect but published proxy.
Why is CCUS HSE a specialist discipline?
The CCUS HSE and regulatory specialist manages Environment Agency permitting, COMAH safety cases, CO2 storage permits and capture-rate compliance. The discipline is scarce partly because the training pipeline is itself short of people. The CCS Task and Finish Group, convened by ECITB, the CCSA, bp and CATCH in February 2024, flagged a “shortage of available trainers for key occupations”.
Olivia Powis, then UK Director and now Chief Executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, put it directly in the CATCH release on that report. “The findings of this report highlight the critical importance of urgent and targeted interventions to tackle skills shortages and promote workforce development in the CCS sector,” she said.
Onshore COMAH sites and offshore safety case work are where these people are now. Airswift’s European HSE manager rate of $800 per day applies.
Who You Are Bidding Against
The transferability case is strong. Robert Gordon University finds over 90% of the UK oil and gas workforce have medium to high skills transferability, and OEUK’s Economy and People Report 2024 puts oil and gas to offshore wind compatibility at up to 90%.
The competition case is stronger. RGU data shows UK oil and gas employment falling from about 120,000 in 2023 to 115,000 in 2024 while renewables rose from about 34,000 to close to 39,000. Offshore wind absorbed most of that movement. CCUS is late to a market that has already started clearing, and it is bidding for the same subsurface, pipeline and HSE people with longer FID timelines and fewer live vacancies.
Scale of eventual demand is not the constraint. Viking alone carries up to £7bn of investment and over 10,000 construction jobs, and Acorn and Viking together could bring over £25bn by 2035 with 30,000 peak construction jobs. The CCSA’s Delivery Plan Update 2025 identifies over 100 projects with 77 MtCO2pa of potential capture capacity. The constraint is that hiring follows FID while the candidates do not wait for it, and how contract risk allocation shapes the candidate profile a project can actually hire decides who an operator can approach before sanction.
Worth being precise about who is hiring today. Live CCUS-specific adverts were confirmed only for Mott MacDonald Bentley in Leeds, recruiting a process engineer for CCS projects, and Mott MacDonald in Croydon, recruiting a graduate process engineer covering CCUS. Eni, Harbour Energy, Storegga, bp, Equinor, Heidelberg Materials and Encyclis are project operators whose hiring follows FID rather than live advertisers. Treating the second group as an active market in 2026 would be a mistake.
What to Do Before 2027
Four things, in order of what buys the most time.
Recruit the adjacent discipline, not the CCUS title. Searching for a carbon capture process engineer returns a pool of a few hundred nationally. Searching for solvent-system commissioning experience in refining and gas processing returns a workable one, and the CCUS-specific content is the shorter part of the learning curve.
Put the retraining plan in the offer. For subsurface roles the addition is CO2 plume modelling and MMV. For pipeline roles it is dense-phase behaviour. Candidates reading an advert that names the gap and funds closing it respond better than those reading one that lists CCUS experience as essential.
Price against the market the candidate is leaving. Airswift’s 2026 European oil and gas rates of $808 to $1,139 per day are the anchor, not UK renewables medians. The way day rates and status interact is set out in the IR35 determination model for renewable energy contracting, and the comparable offshore picture appears in what offshore wind project managers earn and charge per day.
Start before FID. The Track-2 FID window runs to 2029, and operators who wait for sanction will be recruiting against every other sanctioned project simultaneously. Graeme Davies, Executive Vice President for CCS at Harbour Energy, read the June 2025 Spending Review as settling the direction. “The Spending Review today sends a strong signal that Track-2 and Viking CCS are an infrastructure-led economic growth priority in this Parliament,” he said. Direction is enough to start mapping a market, even where it is not yet enough to make an offer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which UK carbon capture projects are actually being built?
Net Zero Teesside Power at 2 Mtpa and the Northern Endurance Partnership took final investment decision in December 2024, with operations expected from 2028. Eni’s 4.5 Mtpa Liverpool Bay store reached FID in April 2025. Heidelberg Materials Padeswood and Encyclis Protos reached financial close in September 2025, with operations from 2029.
How many jobs will carbon capture create in the UK?
The CCS Task and Finish Group projects up to 15,000 direct CCS roles in a peak year by 2030, with 2,500 to 3,000 in transport and storage. The government cited 4,000 jobs across North West and Teesside projects in October 2025. The CCSA’s older 2023 estimate is a peak above 70,000 to 2035.
Can oil and gas workers move into carbon capture?
Mostly yes. Robert Gordon University finds over 90% of the oil and gas workforce have medium to high transferability, particularly in subsurface, pipelines and HSE. Retraining centres on CO2 behaviour, capture chemistry and storage monitoring. But renewables added about 5,000 jobs in 2024, so CCUS competes for the same people.
Why are carbon capture roles so hard to fill?
The specialist base is tiny. Cogent Skills counted only 700 full time UK CCUS employees in 2021. The Public Accounts Committee notes that one planned UK gas power capture plant “would be 40 times larger than any existing examples globally”, and the CCS Task and Finish Group flagged a shortage of trainers for key occupations.
How much is the UK government spending on CCUS?
£21.7bn over 25 years was committed in October 2024 for the first five Track-1 projects, and the June 2025 Spending Review allocated £9.4bn through to 2029/30. The Public Accounts Committee says a quarter comes from the Exchequer and three quarters from consumer levies, with contingent liabilities of up to £34.4bn.
Build your CCUS team before the FID queue clears
Tell us which discipline you are short of and we will map the adjacent pool, name the source sectors and give you the day rates you are bidding against. Our carbon capture recruitment desk works the transport and storage, capture and subsurface markets across Teesside, the Humber, the North West and Aberdeenshire.
