CCS is a dead horse
Time to stop flogging it
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has long been presented as a magic bullet to solve the problem of decarbonising our energy system. If CCS works, we can keep on burning carbon-based fuels, then capture and bury the resulting carbon dioxide. Unsurprisingly, this technology conveniently fills a big hole in lots of plans to achieve net zero. The idea can also be turned around, by saying “go ahead and build new coal plants, as long as they have CCS”. Either way, the big problem has been that so far, CCS hasn’t worked.
The Global CCS Institute has just released its 2025 Global Status of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Report. Like previous reports, it tells an optimistic story, summarised in the following graph, showing a rapidly growing “pipeline” of projects, as well as increasing volumes of CO2 captured, now amounting to 64 million tonnes a year (most of this used in secondary recovery from oilfields)
A closer look reveals a less rosy picture. A look at the light blue (early development) bar suggests that this part of the graph can safely be ignored. Almost none of the projects listed in this category in 2010 went ahead, as can be seen by looking at the low point in 2017. There is nothing in subsequent experience that suggests this is going to change.
Now look at the bottom two (green and brown) bars representing projects actually operating or under construction. The total in 2025 is not much more than the set listed as being operational or in advanced development in 2021 or even in 2011. And the recent growth rate as been modest, as compared with the rapid growth of projects in the light and dark blue “in development” bars.
Finally, is 64 million tonnes a year a lot, or a little. It’s equivalent to the emissions of around 10GW of coal power or the amount saved by installing 40 GW of solar PV . As a comparison, China added nearly 60 GW of solar in the first quarter of this year, achieving a greater emissions reduction than the annual contribution of all the CCS facilities in the world. And solar is actually delivering the rapid growth in installations regularly promised for CCS but never delivered.
Even in the improbable event that the five-fold increase projected in the report is delivered by 2030, CCS will be no more than a marginal contributor to emissions reductions. And as electrification of transport reduces oil demand, the economics of CCS, based on secondary oil recovery, will become even less appealing. This is a dead horse, and it’s time to stop flogging it.
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Carbon capture and storage is excellent! Huge amounts of carbon are captured in the ground already. Let's leave them stored there!
Bring on the empty horses
Take the plausible estimate by Energy Watch Group that the total sequestration needed to return to 450 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is 1,700 gigatonnes of CO2 or 450 Gt of carbon ( https://energywatchgroup.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Ocean-Farming-ENG.pdf , page 12 ). Treating this as a problem in chemical engineering (exemplified by flue gas CCS and direct air capture) is not going to work.
Where is all the carbon to go? Have you seen a professional estimate of the long-term storage capacity that has been reasonably well identified, like mineral reserves? The challenge is to run an equivalent of 50 years of fossil fuel extraction in reverse, in effect filling in all the coal mines and oilfields again. Tinkering at the edges is greenwashing. For now, I just don’t believe it’s doable without magic.
Supposing most improbably that they can fix the capacity problem, the scheme is not affordable. Cost estimates for large-scale CCS are all over the place, which is natural for an untried technology. Including all costs, Google AI gives a best-case lower limit of $123 per tonne CO2 sequestered. That gives a total cost for the 350 ppm programme of $2,100 trn, or $42 trn a year for 50 years. World GDP was only $111 trn in 2024. The CCS solution is obviously infeasible, even with a large thumb on the scales.
Actual costs would almost certainly be higher. We will not be starting with hills of coal and lakes of oil, but gases in the atmosphere. These first have to be phase-changed for burial, except for the quarter that was fossil methane to begin with. Even assuming abundant renewable energy, there are massive capital costs before you even reach the start line. There are other energy cliffs: much gas and some oil was under high pressure when tapped, a free gift of nature that won’t be available for the return match. The sequestration programme would cost more than the initial economic benefits of the decades of extraction.
Finally, the political economy of a full CCS sequestration scheme is not credible. A liveable atmosphere, only attainable by massive carbon sequestration, is the purest public good imaginable. It can only be provided by governments acting together. There would of course be overwhelming pressure from business interests to create artificial market mechanisms. The mitigation transition is going half-well on a similar model - but the good half has been driven by technology and normal investment by capitalists and households, the bad half by failures of public policy and coordination. There is a very large and stable market for electrical energy, which has allowed scattered and inconsistent policy incentives in a handful of countries to enable clean energy to innovate, grow and reap economies of scale globally. There is no analogy in sequestration to the tiny niche market of powering satellites that allowed solar cells to become a real business as early as the 1960s. Sequestration is altruistic socialism at all scales from the word go.
For this to become at all possible politically, there has to be a reasonable prospect of costs per tonne an order of magnitude lower than today’s CCS. If we can get to $12 per tonne, that makes $4 trn a year. That is a tall order but not impossible, as $2 trn a year is already going into clean energy technologies (Bloomberg). The key development that made the fragile, flawed, and temporary, but not imaginary, global consensus of the Paris protocol in 2015 possible was that the net costs of the transition goal had become negligible for most countries in isolation. This was especially true if you counted in the costs of floods, hurricanes and air pollution. The unsolved free rider problem went away, at least for national policymakers who could count.
The only reasonable hope of getting to $12 lies with the fringe guys proposing to leverage known natural processes operating at a large scale. Biomimetic and geomimetic ideas like enhanced rock weathering and automated oceanic seaweed dumping sound crazy, but they are based on science not magical thinking. You have to back the ideas which offer a real chance, however small, of actually solving the problem you are facing. Bring on the empty horses.