It’s well over a decade since Yorkshire saw JCBs digging large trenches all over the county.

They were for a huge pipeline that linked up West and East to transfer water to prevent the shortages we endured in 1995. It was a time of stand pipes in the streets.

The JCBs will soon be at it again as I found out on a recent bus journey. One of the benefits of such travel is access to the Metro free newspaper, and it included two pages of planning information for the Yorkshire and Humber CCS Cross-Country Pipeline.

It’s liquid again, this time capturing carbon dioxide and burying it, and the proposal is from the National Grid, which already runs our high-pressure gas pipelines and electricity network.

The pipeline will be about 75km long, from near Selby, close to the coal-fired power stations, and it will have a diameter of 61cm, and be buried about one metre down. It will reach the coast near Barmston, south of Bridlington, and then rest on the seabed until it reaches a pumping platform. There the CO2 will be forced down into porous rocks, or old, emptied oil and gas fields.

There won’t be much above ground except the occasional small building to allow access for the pigs (pipeline inspection gauges) that trundle along inside the pipeline looking for problems. They are right to do so as it will need to stand pressures of many atmospheres because the gas will have been liquefied under pressure before starting its subterranean journey.

The Yorkshire region produces about one seventh of the UK’s carbon dioxide, some 70 million tonnes, mainly from its power stations, steel mills and chemical works. But as the new pipeline will only handle about 17 million tonnes, there must be serious doubt about whether this is a sensible investment.

An analogy might be the problems associated with shedding personal excess weight. It would be more sensible not to have put on the weight in the first place and so avoid the expense of slimming clubs and exercise bikes to remove it. Common sense suggests that once we acknowledge there’s a problem it’s better to stop doing it rather than dealing with it later.

It’s not clear how expensive the pipeline will be, but the fact that Norway has recently cancelled its own carbon capture development because the cost is out of control suggests that it might be more economic to invest directly in CO2 free energy.

Surely all this money spent capturing and burying CO2 could be better used on subsidies for the carbon-free nuclear, wind, solar and tidal energy industries that we need now, not sometime in the future.