Andreas Sieber is the associate director of global policy and campaigns at 350.org. Stela Herschmann is Climate Policy Specialist at Observatório do Clima, a network of 130 Brazilian organisations.
Four work pillars. Sixteen possible negotiated outcomes. Three advisory “circles”. One “ethical stocktake”. Councils, roadmaps. There are so many shiny objects garnishing the agenda of COP30 that it’s easy to overlook one key absence: the preparations for the Belém climate change conference are simply not addressing the main cause of our current climate disruption.
Fossil fuels, the source of 75% of greenhouse gases, are nowhere to be seen in the negotiations. That must change if Brazil is really willing to make its mutirão – the term it is using to launch a global mobilisation – a turning point in the fight for a livable planet.
At COP28 in Dubai – hosted by a petrostate under the helm of an oil executive – the Global Stocktake (GST) delivered a breakthrough: a clear call to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in an orderly, just and equitable manner”, with urgent action this decade. That this emerged despite, not because of, the host’s interests only underscores its significance.
The Global Stocktake may be dressed in the usual diplomatic language, but its message is unmistakable. It has set a new gold standard for climate action: putting the fossil fuel phaseout at the centre of the global response to the climate crisis.
A few weeks after the landmark Dubai decision, however, some countries started voicing what a top diplomat has called “buyer’s remorse”. At the G20 summit in Brazil last year, some countries led a rebellion against the GST, and managed to prevent the leaders’ declaration from doing as much as reaffirm the commitment from paragraph 28d.
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At COP29, in Baku, the bloody fight for finance, with rich countries’ intransigence denying many others the possibility of implementing the transition, meant that no progress was made on the crucial energy issue.
Some countries argue that the Global Stocktake is not a buffet where countries pick and choose what to implement; all of its provisions must be followed up, including those on finance, which are anathema to developed nations.
Furthermore, they say, the phaseout of fossil fuels outlined in Dubai must be delivered in each country’s climate plan, or NDC. The GST is but a guideline to better NDCs, and now it is up to each country to implement those guidelines as they see fit.
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Meanwhile, in the real world, a fossil frenzy is going on with no end in sight. Rich oil-producing nations such as Norway, Canada and Australia, are expanding their production like there’s no tomorrow (and at the current pace, there really won’t be).
Major developing economies like Brazil and the United Arab Emirates are using the Global North expansion as an excuse to “drill, baby, drill” themselves, each one betting on being the last seller of oil, all gambling with the future of humankind.
Not to say anything, of course, of the world’s top oil producer, the United States, which has become a rogue state under climate-change denier Donald Trump. To countries profiteering from the post-Ukraine invasion fossil orgy, that Saturday morning in 2023 when the gavel came down in Dubai is a hazy memory indeed.
Which brings us to COP30 and its host country.
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Brazil is the only major emitter so far to go beyond merely reaffirming the GST language in its NDC. There, it said it would “welcome the launching of international work for the definition of schedules for transitioning away from fossil fuels”.
That sentence captures one crucial thing about the Dubai energy decision that is lost to GST haters: it is not self-implementable. It needs timetables and a suitable definition of “orderly, just and equitable”. Who goes first, in which time horizons? What are the barriers? How to overcome them?
The world cannot simply commit to phasing out fossil fuels and expect every country to come up voluntarily with a plan on how to constrain its own fossil industries – especially considering the record profits of oil companies this decade. To be implemented, the Dubai text needs to be fleshed out. In short, it needs a COP decision.
What progress on energy at COP30 looks like
To be worthy of its historic billing, COP30 must deliver a formal outcome that accelerates the energy transition and implementation of the first Global Stocktake. There are calls to restrict the energy transition to the Action Agenda, where voluntary commitments are made (and as easily forgotten). This is not nearly enough.
Whether through a mandated process like the UAE Dialogue or a clear-eyed cover decision, COP30 must send a clear political signal and accelerate the energy transition and GST implementation. Here, the COP30 Presidency holds the pen – and the political responsibility – to secure a meaningful outcome on the energy transition that doesn’t tiptoe around hard choices.
What’s more, the COP30 leader-level moment must reinforce and accelerate commitments to triple renewable energy capacity, double energy efficiency, and transition unambiguously away from fossil fuels.
Brazil is well-positioned to lead a dialogue on protecting biodiverse areas from fossil fuel exploration and to initiate discussions on fossil fuel phaseout timelines, as indicated in its NDC. These deliberations should also lead to mandating the tracking of the transition away from fossil fuels and/or setting quantified goals for cutting fossil fuels, e.g. by a reduction goal in their share of the global energy mix by 2030.
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But Brazil can’t go it alone. Other countries also need to step up and put all their heart and diplomatic creativity to work. We are looking at you, Europe, whose leadership has been faltering.
In the case of the African Group of Negotiators, notably the fairly progressive position of the least developed countries (LDCs) has not always been represented by group negotiators on the topics of mitigation (emissions reductions) and fossil fuels.
There is a need to recreate the alliance that led to the successful Dubai outcome, while listening to the concerns of other countries that do not have the fiscal space to transition, in Africa in particular, or are concerned about meeting development needs, as in Asia.
In the coming weeks, two key moments for climate diplomacy shall test the will of the world to deal with the elephant in the room. This week, ministers and heads of delegation have gathered in Copenhagen to find political common ground for Belém. In June, technical UN negotiations for COP30 will take place in Bonn. At both meetings, fossil fuels need to be part of the conversation. We don’t have another 30 years to waste.
The post COP30 must heed the elephant in the room: fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA includes 1.7GtCO2 being captured by 2035 in its net-zero scenario – nearly 30 times more than is captured today.
(Some of the much higher numbers in scenarios assessed by the IPCC have been dismissed by experts as implausible, especially given the slow rollout of CCS to date.)
When considering CCS for both emissions cuts and removals, Dr Jennifer Roberts, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and deputy director at the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC), tells Carbon Brief the situation is clear:
“From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach.”
This does not mean that it would be impossible to reach net-zero without using CCS. However, net-zero scenarios that use little or no CCS rely on dramatic changes elsewhere, such as much lower global energy demand.
Net-zero scenarios often include a crucial role for CCS in “hard-to-abate” sectors, referring to activities that lack available, low-cost options to fully decarbonise. In particular, CCS is widely seen as vital for decarbonising parts of heavy industry.
The IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) summary for policymakers calls CCS a “critical mitigation option” for some sectors, including cement and chemicals. The technical summary of the AR6 Working Group III report says that “CCS will be required to mitigate remaining CO2” in industrial sectors.
The IEA describes CCS as “virtually the only technology” that can significantly cut cement emissions, which account for around 7% of the global total. (Much of this CO2 comes from chemical processes, meaning it would still be released if the industry was electrified.)
Yet, the understanding of “hard-to-abate” emissions is changing, as alternatives to CCS become cheaper and increasingly available. As a result, CCS has become a less attractive option in some sectors, as well as being seen as less vital in some others.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that the IEA has reduced its outlook for CCS in the power sector by a third, compared to its expectations in 2021, as the chart below shows.
This reflects both slow progress in deploying CCS and rapid cost reductions in renewables, which make running gas or coal power plants less attractive.
(Even prior to this adjustment, the IEA’s net-zero scenario was already at the lower end of CCS use, compared to those assessed by the IPCC.)
This declining role for CCS in the power sector would mean its use is more concentrated in industry.
Industrial sectors – particularly cement, steel and chemicals – account for 60% of the CO2 captured in 2050 under the IEA’s net-zero scenario, as shown in the figure below. The remaining 40% is roughly split between electricity generation and blue hydrogen production.
Climate NGOs Bellona and E3G have stressed that with “limited public funding, infrastructure constraints and political attention, prioritisation is essential” for CCS. Their “CCS ladder” places CCS in cement and lime production at the top