There is something seductive about the idea of carbon capture and storage. The logic is elegant: if we can’t stop burning fossil fuels fast enough, why not simply catch the emissions before they reach the atmosphere and bury them underground? Problem managed. Crisis averted. Existing industries preserved.
It is a compelling story. It is also, many scientists and climate advocates argue, a dangerously convenient one.
As investment in CCS accelerates globally — with 628 projects in the pipeline and investments tripling since 2022 to reach $6.4 billion — it’s worth examining what this technology can actually do, what it can’t, and why so many people believe it is being used as cover for the one thing the climate crisis most urgently demands: a radical, rapid reduction in the emissions we produce in the first place.
What CCS actually is — and how it works
Carbon capture and storage is not a single technology. It is a family of approaches, each capturing CO₂ at different points in the emissions process.
Post-combustion capture is the most established method, removing CO₂ from flue gas after fossil fuels have been burned. It is the most retrofit-friendly option for existing industrial plants, though solvent regeneration still imposes energy penalties of 8–10 percentage points.
Pre-combustion capture converts fuel into hydrogen and CO₂ before burning, capturing the carbon at that stage. It offers thermodynamic advantages but requires high-capital gasifiers or cryogenic air separation units, slowing adoption.
Oxy-fuel combustion burns fuel in pure oxygen rather than air, producing a concentrated CO₂ stream that is easier to capture. China United Cement Company commissioned an oxy-fuel combustion project in early 2025 that will capture around 200,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) is the most ambitious variant — machines that pull CO₂ directly from the open atmosphere rather than from a specific emissions source. The world’s largest DAC facility, STRATOS in Texas, recently came into operation. It is also eye-wateringly expensive, with costs currently well above $300 per tonne in most deployments.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) combines biomass energy generation with carbon capture, theoretically producing negative emissions. Critics point out that it carries significant land use and biodiversity risks, and that BECCS facilities incinerate trees and crop biomass to make electricity, releasing CO₂ and toxic air pollutants in the process. Global Market Insights
The gap between promise and reality
Even its proponents acknowledge that CCS has a credibility problem. Not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO₂ capture rate, and an IEEFA review of 16 projects finds that even though the industry claims a 95% capture rate is achievable, no existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon.
The scale problem is equally sobering. CCS is expected to grow to capture just 6% of global CO₂ emissions by 2050, up from 0.5% in 2030. Meanwhile, to meet net zero targets, global CCS capacity must expand more than 100 times to reach 4 to 6 gigatons of CO₂ per year by 2050. The mathematics of that challenge are, to put it charitably, daunting.
Then there is cost. Removing CO₂ in fossil fuel power plants increases costs by $50–$200 per tonne of CO₂ removed, while there are many ways to reduce emissions that cost less than $20 per tonne of avoided CO₂. Wind and solar, by comparison, are now often the cheapest available source of new electricity generation — without needing to bury anything underground.
The distraction argument
Here is where the debate becomes genuinely contentious — and genuinely important.
Critics see CCS as an unproven, expensive technology that will perpetuate dependence on fossil fuels, and believe other ways to reduce emissions are more effective. Their concern is not simply that CCS doesn’t work well enough. It’s that the narrative around CCS actively slows the transition away from fossil fuels by making continued emissions seem manageable.
“Carbon capture and storage essentially perpetuates fossil fuel reliance. It’s a distraction and a delay tactic,” says Jennie Stephens, a climate justice researcher at Northeastern University.
The numbers lend weight to this concern. Nearly three-quarters of the carbon captured through CCS projects today is used to extract more oil from the ground through enhanced oil recovery — meaning the captured carbon is being used to produce the very product whose combustion created the problem in the first place.
According to both the IPCC and International Energy Agency, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and eliminating fugitive methane emissions can address more than 80% of the world’s decarbonisation requirements by 2030. CCS, even optimistically, addresses a fraction of the remainder. The question critics are asking — loudly and with growing urgency — is why so much political capital, subsidy, and public attention is flowing toward the fraction rather than the 80%.
Where CCS has a genuine role
None of this means CCS is worthless. Even its critics tend to acknowledge a legitimate, limited use case: the so-called hard-to-abate sectors. CCS is often the most feasible decarbonisation technology for process industries such as cement, steel, and chemical production — industries where the CO₂ emissions are inherent to the chemical process itself, not just the energy source. In these contexts, capture at the point of emission is not a distraction from decarbonisation. It may be the only viable path.
In Norway, Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik cement plant became the first industrial facility to capture CO₂ at scale and store it permanently through the Northern Lights project — a milestone demonstrating Europe’s first fully operational CCS value chain. This is CCS doing what it arguably should be doing: tackling the emissions that have nowhere else to go.
The uncomfortable truth
The honest answer is that CCS is neither the silver bullet its proponents claim nor the pure distraction its fiercest critics suggest. It is a set of technologies with genuine, specific applications and severe, well-documented limitations — being marketed, in many cases, as something far more comprehensive than the evidence supports.
The climate crisis does not have room for false comfort. Every year spent waiting for CCS to scale to a level that could meaningfully offset continued fossil fuel use is a year not spent on the solutions — renewable energy, energy efficiency, electrification, and systemic emissions reduction — that can actually deliver the cuts the science demands, at the pace the science demands them.
Capturing carbon after the fact will always be harder, more expensive, and less reliable than not producing it in the first place. That is not an argument against CCS in the hard-to-abate sectors where it is genuinely needed. It is an argument against using it as a reason to delay the far more important work of stopping the emissions at their source.
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