Oil companies and governments bet on carbon capture and storage technology to solve the Climate Crisis. It’s not going to work.

​As the Climate Crisis accelerates faster than scientists predicted and emissions continue to soar beyond all-time record highs, companies are betting on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to reverse global warming, but progress is slow and investment is being made in a narrow range of technologies and is a fraction of what is needed to make a difference.

At the COP28 summit held in Baku, hydrocarbon companies pledged themselves for the first time to reduce emissions. But COP28 was a cop-out, as they committed to only reduce “non-abatable” emissions. In other words, they pledged to reduce CO₂ emissions from fuel use where capturing the emissions using CCS technology was not possible, handing themselves a free pass to burn hydrocarbons where it is possible.

Insufficient CCS capacity rules it out as a solution

The caveat is this assumes that capturing carbon is possible in theory. The reality is the technology remains underdeveloped and with current capacity a total of 318,000 tonnes of CO₂ was captured and stored in 2024, against the 3.5 gigatonnes of CO₂ that needs to be captured to reverse the global rise of temperatures, reports Bloomberg. Climate activists complain that making commitments based on the use of a technology that doesn’t yet exist is simply a greenwashing attempt being used by oil companies to ignore the need to cut emissions.

Not only is the technology not mature enough to roll out on a large scale; a study last year found that even if it were, there is not enough underground storage space to hold all the CO₂ that must be removed in order to reverse the rise in temperatures.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change in September 2024 and led by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Bergen, concluded that the current and projected carbon CCS capacity is significantly insufficient to meet the climate targets set by the Paris Agreement.

The research indicated that even with significant efforts, CCS deployment is unlikely to expand rapidly enough to achieve the 1.5°C target and may not be adequate for the 2°C goal. The study estimated that, in this century, no more than 600 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide can be sequestered with CCS, falling well short of the 1,000-plus gigatonnes needed to make a difference outlined in in several United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mitigation scenarios. One of the major problems is there is simply not enough underground storage capacity to hold all the CO₂ captured, even if it could be captured by as yet non-existent technology.

While government policies could increase CCS capacity eightfold by 2030, historical failure rates of 90% suggest that this target may be overly optimistic, the study found.

To meet the 2°C target, CCS would need to grow as quickly as wind power did in the early 2000s, and by the 2040s match the peak growth rate of nuclear energy in the 1970s.

It’s not going to happen. Even if it did, the researchers warned the 1.5°C threshold is likely already out of reach. The IPCC itself recently warned that the 1.5-2C temperature upper limit targets set in Paris have already been missed and the world is now on track to see a catastrophic 2.7C-3.1C increase in temperatures by 2100.

“Humanity is choosing to fail! We are doing virtually nothing to try and limit global warming to even 4°C, let alone to 1.5°C. Methane concentrations are following the highest IPCC scenario, now at 1,938 ppb,” says Lee Simmons, a climatologist.

According to the IPCC projections (chart), methane concentrations in the atmosphere of 1,938 parts per billion put global warming on course for more than a 4C temperature rise by 2050 that will see seas rise by several metres, global food security threatened and large parts of the planet made uninhabitable.

Another study found that the melting of the permafrost is now “locked in” and irreversible, even if emissions were cut to 1.5C tomorrow. There is an estimated 1,000 gigatonnes of primordial CO₂ locked in the Siberian ice that will be released into the atmosphere as a result – twice the amount of CO₂ released by humanity since the dawn of history.

Emissions are currently running at all-time record highs and not only is the amount of emissions increasing, the rate of the rise of emissions is also rising, with the off-the-chart explosion of US shale gas production accounting for a large proportion of the gains.

Current investment into CCS technology and capacity woefully inadequate

Climate ambitions are sharpening as the scale of the crisis becomes increasingly obvious as a third disaster season gets under way. 2023 saw the hottest summer on record, followed by 2024 that broke all the records of the previous year. Indeed, 2024 was the hottest year in documented history and the first year where temperatures were higher than 1.5C above the pre-industrial baseline every month of the year. This year is going to be worse still.

Yet carbon removal technologies are still being touted as the solution to the problem. A disproportionate flow of capital and government support is flowing into a narrow set of approaches – especially direct air capture (DAC) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which is raising concerns that the sector’s potential is being constrained by political and industrial bias, Bloomberg reports.

Companies ranging from Occidental Petroleum and Microsoft to BlackRock and Breakthrough Energy Ventures have collectively invested billions of dollars into carbon removal ventures. The United States Department of Energy (DoE) has committed more than $1bn in support, taking a lead in launching this nascent industry, but it is a drop in the bath-tub warm ocean against what is needed. And now even that commitment may be in jeopardy after the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement and promised to curtail funding for climate initiatives, including carbon removal.

Despite more than 900 startups exploring at least eight distinct categories of atmospheric carbon removal, investment has clustered around DAC. This technology – using machines to extract CO₂ directly from the air – has attracted $3.3bn between 2020 and 2024, nearly equalling the $3.4bn committed to all other novel methods combined, according to carbon removal data platform CDR.fyi, Bloomberg reports.

“There’s no scientific consensus that DAC is the best way to remove carbon,” Danny Cullenward, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told Bloomberg. “It’s receiving support not because of its performance, but because the political economy of the oil and gas industry is much more powerful than these other emerging industries.”

BECCS, too, commands a dominant share of market interest, accounting for almost 60% of carbon removal purchases between 2019 and 2024. The process, which involves burning biomass for energy and sequestering the emissions, theoretically locks in carbon absorbed by plants. Yet critics point out that emissions from harvesting and transporting feedstock actually produce more emissions than can be captured, offsetting any gains from CCS.

The upshot is the effectiveness of these dominant methods remains modest at best. According to CDR.fyi, DAC has removed just 1,200 tonnes of CO₂ up to the end of 2024 – less than 0.2% of all recorded removals and a tiny fraction of the gigatonnes that need to be removed. BECCS accounts for 10,000 tonnes, or under 1.7%, an equally insignificant amount. 

Less prominent techniques with potentially greater promise are being largely ignored. Some startups are enhancing natural weathering by dispersing crushed basalt rock over farmland or boosting the ocean’s alkalinity. Others are experimenting with seawater electrolysis. These methods are often more durable and verifiable in their carbon sequestration than tree planting, but they lack financial and regulatory support afforded to DAC and BECCS to get them off the ground.

Biochar – carbon-rich material produced by burning organic matter in limited oxygen – has been the most successful removal method to date, delivering the largest share of verified removals without tax credits, big-ticket buyers or major capital inflows. Still, uncertainty over how much CO₂ remains stored when biochar is applied to different soils limits its scalability, Bloomberg reports.