Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) to use or store remains one of the costliest ways to cut emissions. That means the technique – known as CCUS – has yet to scale up, still relies on taxpayer support and should only be pursued after other green solutions, key industry players told a recent conference in London.
Companies and governments that depend heavily on fossil fuel revenues have long promoted CCUS technology as a way to carry on producing and consuming fossil fuels while keeping emissions down.
But over 50 years since the first project began operating, CCUS is still barely used. According to the Global CCS Institute, just 50 facilities were running around the world in 2024, with the capacity to capture about a thousandth of global emissions.
Most of those capture CO2 from gas facilities and pump it underground to squeeze more oil from reservoirs, a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).
At this month’s Carbon Capture Global Summit 2025 – organised by Leader Associates – business representatives admitted that the technology has failed to expand on a commercial scale despite strong government support. CCUS momentum has even “plateaued a wee bit” in 2025, said Mhairidh Evans, head of CCUS research at consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
Subsidies still needed
Julia Dubinina, a former Shell manager now developing oil and gas firm Harbour Energy’s carbon storage business, was asked if CCUS is entering its “deployment phase”. She replied that it is “too early to talk about scale”, adding “we need to be careful of not trying to fly before we can walk”. “There is still quite a lot of work to be done,” she added.
She remains cautious partly because “public funding is an absolute must for every project, and scaling is kind of limited when you need public funding for every single project,” she explained.
The industry depends on subsidies because capturing and transporting CO2 is among the most expensive climate solutions. In 2021, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists reported that while solar and wind investments usually save money, CCUS costs $50-200 per tonne of CO2 captured.
In a keynote speech at the conference, Katharina Beumelberg, sustainability chief at Heidelberg Materials – which produces cement, aggregates, concrete and asphalt – acknowledged the sector’s reliance on taxpayer support.
Praising the Norwegian government’s funding for one of the company’s CCUS projects, she said: “We need these funding processes to be able to do this pioneering work because, otherwise, from the private sector it would be unrealistic to get there”. She added: “Whatever we do in the end needs to make money.”
Beumelberg called for more taxpayer support for CCUS. Noting that three-fifths of Heidelberg’s products are used in government-funded projects, she said governments should create a market for carbon-free products, “recognising that a carbon-free product in the end does need to come with different pricing because it is carbon-free”.
Because of its high cost, most experts say CCUS should be reserved for sectors that are hard to clean up in other ways like steel, chemicals and particularly cement.
Expensive last resort
Cement-making produces 8% of global emissions, more than any country apart from the US and China, as fossil fuels are burned to heat limestone and the chemical process itself releases CO2.
But Rozemarijn Wesby, vice-president of CCUS at the world’s biggest cement company Holcim, told the conference that even in cement, the high cost of CCUS means it is only the “last piece of the puzzle”.
That’s because Holcim’s decarbonisation goal is more important than its CCUS goal, she said – and CCUS is one of the more expensive ways to cut emissions. For that reason, Holcim is first ensuring that its power is “green”, fuels are “sustainable and renewable” and emissions avoided “wherever possible”.
Evans of Wood Mackenzie echoed this, saying governments and companies should prioritise energy efficiency, then “electrifying everything that we possibly can with renewables, then fuel switching [and] substituting” before “at the last, directly abating or removing carbon dioxide”.
Wesby stressed that using CCUS only as a last step limits costs and prevents oversized “downstream” infrastructure. The CCUS infrastructure discussed at the conference included pipelines and trains to move CO2, terminals to store, compress and load it onto ships, and underground storage sites.
A Nature study published this month, however, found that the world’s CO2 storage potential is far more constrained than previously thought. Lead author Matthew Gidden of the University of Maryland argued in a post on CarbonBrief that governments should prioritise who gets access to storage space.
Carbon capture for gas plants?
Electricity is one of the easiest sectors to decarbonise because renewable power is often cheaper than fossil fuels. As of 2024, only five fossil-fuel power plants had CCUS, all of which used the CO2 for EOR. Only one, Huaneng Yangpu in China, is a gas power station and that is just a demonstration project.
Nonetheless, the UK government financially supports a CCUS project at a gas plant in England’s Northeast and is considering support for another in Wales run by power firm Uniper. Mike Lockett, Uniper’s UK head, said that Germany’s new centre right-led government had also “opened the door for gas-fired CCS”.
Supporters say such plants produce flexible and dispatchable power, unlike solar and wind. Critics argue batteries, demand management, nuclear and cross-border interconnections can provide sufficient backup.
Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus, a UK-based clean energy, electric vehicle services and heat pump company, said recently that – while it’s useful for cement – subsidising CCUS for energy is misguided.
Jackson, who is also an official adviser to the UK government, told the Financial Times Weekend Festival that the technology has “been a gift to the oil and gas industry to carry on what they’re doing and carry on the fiction that somehow enormous amounts of public money should enable them to keep doing it”.
“It’s a boondoggle for oil and gas – and we would be better off in the UK just burning unabated gas, because the cheaper we make electricity, the cheaper our heat pumps and electric cars are going to be and they are the key to emissions reductions,” he said.
Risk of pipeline leaks
Building out CCUS on a large scale will involve vast CO2 pipeline networks. These come with risks: In 2020, a landslide caused a carbon pipeline to leak in the US state of Mississippi, hospitalising at least 45 people. High concentrations of CO2 can cause headaches, drowsiness, elevated heartbeat and blood pressure, and even death.
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Climate Home News asked Niko Bosnjak, policy and communications lead at carbon pipeline operator Open Grid Europe (OGE), which is converting German gas pipelines to carry CO2, if similar leaks could happen in Europe.
He said he had heard about the Mississippi incident, although he didn’t “know exactly what happened”. OGE, he added, is working on a security framework and “looking at the thickness of the pipeline in a way that is supposed to provide more security”.
Despite such concerns, CCUS has continued to receive strong political backing. US President Donald Trump, for example, cut subsidies for other green technologies but expanded support for CCUS, while India is preparing CCUS subsidies.
“The need for CCS is broadly recognised at the political level,” said Shell’s CCS general manager Kelly Ripley. Oil and gas giant Shell is launching CCUS projects – especially in North America and northwest Europe – she added, and is “doing a lot of learning from this political and regulatory perspective and also hoping to bring other countries on the same journey with us”.
The post Industry says carbon capture still an expensive last resort to cut emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry says carbon capture still an expensive last resort to cut emissions
Removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is widely expected to play a key role in meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.
But this will only be effective for slowing climate change if the CO2 can be stored securely and indefinitely.
This requires “geological carbon storage”, where captured CO2 is injected deep underground, where it can stay trapped for thousands of years.
While the current deployment of CO2 removal (CDR) technologies around the world is small, almost all facilities aim to store captured CO2 in sedimentary basins.
However, in our study in Nature, we show that current policy approaches to using these formations on a larger scale could be suffering from a false sense of abundance.
We find that – once technical, social and environmental risks are considered – the world’s available reserves of geological carbon storage are significantly more limited than most estimates suggest.
Our research shows that, of nearly 12,000bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) of theoretical carbon storage capacity, just 1,460GtCO2 is risk-free.
Significantly, we find that, if all available safe carbon storage capacity were used for CO2 removal, this would contribute to only a 0.7C reduction in global warming.
In short, geological carbon storage is not limitless – on the contrary, its practical potential is a rather scarce planetary resource.
From technical potential to prudent limits
When studies estimate where carbon could be stored for the long term, they typically start by looking at all sedimentary basins worldwide to find those that are mature and stable.
However, norms of international environmental law indicate that high standards of due diligence must be applied to prevent transboundary environmental harm. As scientists, we were therefore interested in understanding how much storage capacity would be available when looking through a precautionary lens.
Our study develops the first global estimate of safe and durable carbon storage that takes into account social, environmental and technical risks – in addition to the geological qualities of the basins.
Rather than taking raw geological capacity at face value, we screen the potential locations for a number of factors:
- Seismic hazards
- Groundwater contamination.
- Proximity to population centres.
- Biodiversity protections, such as environmentally protected areas and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
- Engineering limitations, such as basin depths that are too shallow to store carbon indefinitely or too deep underground and locations too deep in the ocean.
- Political feasibility, such as maritime areas outside of national jurisdictions or disputed geographical areas.
The results of our assessment are stark. We find that, out of nearly 12,000GtCO2 of theoretical carbon storage capacity in sedimentary basins, just 1,460GtCO2 can be considered robust for climate planning purposes.
We refer to this as “prudent” storage capacity.
This is an order of magnitude less than commonly-cited figures.
In 2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) special report on carbon capture and storage estimated that there is a “technical potential of at least about 2,000GtCO2…of storage capacity in geological formations”.
Over the two decades since, estimates have ballooned to 10,000-40,000GtCO2, depending on the academic or industry source that is consulted.
What this means for warming limits
Our research finds that if all reserves of “prudent” storage were used solely for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, they would enable – at most – a 0.7C reduction in global temperatures.
This falls to as little as 0.4C if we conservatively take the lower end of the likely (>66%) range of how much warming or cooling we expect per tonne of CO2 emitted or removed, respectively.
For the first time, our new study provides an estimate for an upper limit for how much past warming could be reversed through geological storage.
However, under most low-carbon pathways available in the academic and technical literature and assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this prudent geological storage limit would be used up before 2200 – and some by 2100.
In many cases, storage is not used to draw down atmospheric CO2, but to balance the continued production of greenhouse gas and carbon pollution from human activities.
And yet, without sharp near-term cuts in gross emissions, the likely overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C warming limit could prove irreversible.
Equity and responsibility
The maps below show how prudent storage capacity – for offshore (left) and onshore (right) basins – is not evenly distributed.
The “prudent” global storage potential (in GtCO2) for offshore (left) and onshore (right) basins, by individual countries. Darker shading indicates a greater amount of storage capacity. Source: Gidden et al. (2025)
Much of it is found in large, fossil-fuel-producing nations, such as the US, Australia, Russia and Saudi Arabia. These countries are among the world’s biggest historical emitters.
(This is not a coincidence, as these nations’ fossil-fuel-based economies are the result of relatively easily reachable geological deposits.)
However, the reality that the nations most responsible for emissions also appear best placed to store them raises equity concerns. Nations who benefitted from enabling carbon pollution would now also benefit from the clean up.
Other countries, such as Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have substantial storage, but little domestic incentive to use it unless compensated.
Meanwhile, emissions-intensive nations would now be first in line to transform themselves from extractors to large-scale injectors of carbon – and could benefit from new business opportunities, often paid for by the public purse.
However, sovereign wealth funds – state-owned investment funds, often built on fossil revenues – could play a role in financing this shift, in line with the “polluter pays” principle.
Planning for scarcity
Treating storage as a finite and scarce resource has a knock-on effect for climate policy.
For example, governments would need to decide explicitly how they intend to allocate limited carbon storage capacity – should storage capacity be used to abate residual, industrial and fossil-fuel emissions, or for CO2 that has been directly pulled from the atmosphere?
Norms of international environmental law – and the recent “advisory opinion” on climate change from the International Court of Justice – provide guidance as to what countries ought to do. The principle of harm prevention indicates that risks of climate harm should be minimised where possible.
To limit risks to implementing climate targets, carbon capture and storage (CCS) should be seen as a complement to – but not a substitute – for rapid emissions cuts. This recommendation is not new – it has long been called for by researchers looking at the trade-offs and negative side-effects of specific negative emissions technologies, including the impacts poorly governed deployment of these technologies can have on biodiversity and food security.
Our geological storage estimate represents an assessment of reserves today – but this is likely to change with time as knowledge, preferences and governance of CO2 storage change.
CDR technologies that provide alternatives to geological storage, such as mineralisation in basalt, show promise. However, these technologies remain at pilot scale, with only a few million tonnes stored to date.
Climate strategies that rely on nascent CDR technologies would not constitute a strategy that minimises risks and potential harm to today’s and future generations.
The bottom line
Geological carbon storage is not a limitless backstop – and assuming otherwise puts the world at risk of irreversibly exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C threshold for global warming.
However, at the same time, carbon storage will almost certainly play a pivotal role in any future where global “net-zero” CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions is achieved.
By acknowledging the scarcity of carbon storage – and designating reserves for essential and strategic uses – governments can limit the risks of harm to people and the planet.
The post Guest post: How the role of carbon storage has been hugely overestimated appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How the role of carbon storage has been hugely overestimated
A claim that UK gas produced in the North Sea emits “four times” less carbon dioxide (CO2) than imported liquified natural gas (LNG) featured prominently in both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph this week.
It came after Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch announced a pledge to drill “all” the remaining oil and gas in the North Sea, reigniting debates about new fossil-fuel production in the UK.
The claim that “UK gas is almost four times cleaner” than LNG imports was first made by a North Sea Transition Authority report in 2023 and is often repeated by senior Conservative politicians, as well as other public figures.
However, this figure is highly misleading.
It only refers to the emissions that come from the process of extracting and delivering the gas, which are much smaller than those from burning it.
When both extraction and burning of the gas are taken into account, CO2 emissions from UK production are only around 15% lower than those from LNG imports, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
Focusing on LNG imports alone is also misleading.
Official data shows that, from January to June 2025, the majority of UK gas imports came via pipeline from Norway.
Over this period, the UK imported 156,599 gigawatt hours (GWh) of gas from Norway via pipeline, the data shows. Its total LNG imports from all countries came to 82,378GWh.
An analysis published in 2022 found that, on average, emissions from extracting and processing gas in the UK North Sea are nearly three times higher than those from Norwegian production.
Previous analysis from the Climate Change Committee found that there is a small emissions “advantage” when UK oil and gas production is compared to the global average.
However, the CCC added that this emissions advantage would be wiped if increased production in the UK boosted global gas demand even fractionally, because it would lead to higher overall fossil-fuel use.
The UN Emissions Gap Report in 2023 said that the coal, oil and gas extracted over the lifetime of producing and under-construction mines and fields as of 2018 “would emit more than 3.5 times the carbon budget available” for meeting the Paris Agreement’s aim of keeping temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The world’s highest international court recently gave a landmark opinion stating that granting new fossil-fuel exploration licences “may constitute an internationally wrongful act” attributable to the state issuing them.
This is based on a wide body of scientific evidence on how fossil-fuelled climate change has endangered people and ecosystems.
Output from the North Sea is already in decline. Oil production peaked in 1999, while gas production in the UK continental shelf peaked in 2000.
After decades of drilling, the majority of reserves left in the North Sea is oil. Contrary to claims that it would increase energy security or bring down bills to issue new licences, around 80% of oil produced in UK waters is currently exported to the global market.
The post Factcheck: North Sea gas is not ‘four times cleaner’ than LNG imports appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: North Sea gas is not ‘four times cleaner’ than LNG imports
By John Kerry, Visiting Statesman at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former US Secretary of State, and former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
Many eyes in the climate community are focused on COP30 in Belem this November, but there’s another critical climate moment happening now in September: London International Shipping Week.
This can be a moment to put industry’s muscle behind the decisions that need to be made to reap the benefits and accelerate the opportunity presented by the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) April embrace of the Net-Zero Framework, which is to be formally adopted by governments next month.
The maritime community understands the significance of this agreement, the very first to align action with the IMO’s 2023 climate strategy words: combining a mandatory greenhouse gas fuel standard with a pricing mechanism that can reward first movers, and stimulate a rapid, worldwide transition that’s just and equitable.
First, though, that Framework must be adopted, and I encourage all Member States to support its passage at October’s extraordinary session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee. This deal agreed in April is the result of long and complex negotiations and a victory for multilateral cooperation.
A cornerstone to this approach is ensuring that all greenhouse gas emissions – not just CO2 – are addressed as soon as the protections enter into force in 2027. Similarly, emissions will be regulated on a well-to-wake basis.
While some details remain open for further negotiation, the shipping sector must now plan for a clean energy market – with opportunities for asset managers and fleet owners to reap the advantages of being first movers.
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The details of the Framework shouldn’t cut corners or dodge emissions commitments with teeth; fuel production should be backed by a robust sustainability criterion that accounts for elements of production such as indirect land uses changes.
These standards will help ensure the market accelerates and rewards solutions which are truly sustainable, scalable, and capable of delivering deep greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Current evidence suggests the e-fuels, or fuels made from renewable energy and green hydrogen, meet these criteria best. Use of these fuels must also be properly rewarded within the IMO’s Framework and supported by further national and private actions.
Some shipowners are already accelerating their turn towards this growing market and should continue to do so. In 2024 supply of alternative fuels such as ammonia or e-methanol was projected to be 50% higher than it was just in 2023. Their example is an important one for others who may believe that short-term fixes are a path of least resistance. Economic opportunity awaits those who act now to race to the other side of the shipping transition.
Customers are clearly ready and waiting for additional shipowners to make the jump. In February the second tender from the Zero Emission Buyer’s Alliance was launched, with 40 member companies looking to ship 1.5 million containers’ worth of goods on e-fuels. These commitments are commendable. More companies must join, and more investment is needed for this effort to succeed.
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Beyond opportunity, it’s important to also consider risk. Reinvesting in the old way of doing things or patchwork short term solutions such as liquified natural gas could translate into stranded assets for these companies in short order.
Beyond fuels, to meet the full goals of the Revised Strategy energy efficiency solutions or technological innovations such as wind-assisted propulsion power should be deployed at greater scale. Many remain relatively underutilized.
Shippers can reverse this trend, not just for the immediate fuel savings, but for the degree of resilience these technical measures offer in the face of strengthening climate regulations. More tools exist today to help shipowners navigate these decisions, and the financial sector can offer more creative products to accelerate the transition.
At COP 26, as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, I stood with CEOs from the world’s largest companies and we launched the First Mover’s Coalition to demonstrate a simple proposition: a gigantic industry-led demand signal for the climate solutions hard-to-abate sectors were longing to create.
In a short time, global shipping has risen to the challenge and developed many of the tools envisioned in that initiative. We now have enabling frameworks backing up the growing market for solutions that everyone at London International Shipping Week can embrace.
We are on the cusp of something exciting – proof that “if you build it, better solutions will come.” It’s an historic moment to stop waiting for perfection, get to work, and decide that we’re all first movers now – for our economy, and our future.
The post Diplomacy accelerated shipping climate action; it’s time to seal the deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Diplomacy accelerated shipping climate action; it’s time to seal the deal
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