5 key reasons to read the article
- The world appears to be betting its climate future on a technology that captures less than 0.2% of global emissions.
- Most carbon capture today is not lowering pollution; it is being used to pump more oil.
- Oil and gas companies control nearly all the world’s carbon capture capacity.
- The world’s biggest and most expensive capture projects fail to meet even their own modest targets.
- If carbon capture fails, the world will not just lose money, it may lose the last of its carbon budget.
For more than a decade, carbon capture and storage (CCS) was promoted as the technology that could tackle global warming while the world transitioned away from fossil fuels. Capture the carbon dioxide heating the planet before it reaches the atmosphere, bury it deep underground, and carry on.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed carbon capture as one of the pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors such as the cement, steel and chemical industries. Governments embraced it. The fossil fuel industry championed it.
But somewhere between the pitch and the reality, questions began to arise about whether the technology was delivering meaningful climate benefits or entrenching the very system that is driving the crisis.
What is carbon capture?
CCS refers to a suite of technologies designed to intercept carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from power plants, cement factories, or directly from the air, compress it, transport it by pipeline or ship and inject it deep underground into geological formations. The idea is to prevent emissions reaching the atmosphere or to remove them after they have done so.
However, a tension exists with much of today’s critical CCS infrastructure being tied to the production of more fossil fuels.
Who is building and who is benefiting?
Carbon capture is expanding at an unprecedented rate. According to the Global CCS Institute’s 2025 report, 610 projects are now sitting in the global pipeline, 77 facilities are operational worldwide, and 47 are under construction.
The United States and China are among the leaders in operational projects, with Canada and Norway also hosting a significant number of facilities. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), oil and gas companies own roughly 90% of the world’s operational carbon capture capacity, much of it in these four countries.
This ownership structure helps to explain what most captured carbon is actually used for.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) estimates that 70% of all carbon dioxide captured globally is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In this process, CO₂ is injected into ageing oil fields to extract more crude. Historically, 80–90% of all carbon ever captured has been channeled towards oil extraction, not permanent storage.
When the resulting oil is burned, it often releases more carbon dioxide than was ever captured. A 2020 analysis of more than 200 studies found that carbon capture linked to EOR frequently leads to net increases in emissions once the full lifecycle effects are considered.
Critics comment that public subsidies have reinforced this pattern rather than reversed it. In the United States, public policy explicitly supports this model. Companies can claim up to US$85 per ton of CO₂ permanently stored and US$60 per ton for carbon used in enhanced oil recovery under the 45Q tax credit. This means that projects that produce more oil still qualify for substantial public support.
In Europe, the emphasis is different. The U.K. has pledged £21.7 billion over 25 years, while the European Union is mobilizing billions to support CCS for industrial decarbonization rather than oil extraction. Nevertheless, experts argue that since the industry that is using and controlling CCS is still overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based and heavily tied to oil production, much of the carbon capture system is still being shaped by the priorities of oil and gas production.
Does carbon capture actually work?
Today’s 77 operational facilities capture around 64 million tons of CO₂ per year, a ridiculously tiny fraction of the more than 35 billion tons the world emits annually. And even if the most optimistic projections of the IEA come true and the capture capacity did reach 430 million tons a year by 2030, that would remain far below the 1.3 billion tons required for net-zero pathways.
That gap seems to be compounded by a second problem in that many projects have struggled to perform even at their intended scale.
A 2022 IEEFA review found that 10 of the world’s 13 leading CCS projects underachieved against their original expectations. For example, Australia’s Gorgon facility, the world’s largest, has captured as little as 25% of its intended volumes, despite more than US$6 billion in capital and remedial costs.
A climate solution or a dangerous delay?
According to Climate Action Tracker, most national climate plans now assume that large-scale, future carbon removal will meet net-zero targets, often involving around a fifth of emissions. Few include explicit targets to reduce oil or gas production, and phase‑out commitments remain rare.
Critics argue that CCS has become the fossil fuel’s industry insurance policy. As Lili Fuhr, Director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s fossil economy program, put it, CCS has become “the industry’s lifeline and latest delay tactic,” “a smokescreen” that allows fossil fuel interests to claim they are acting on climate while continuing to expand production.
The risk is not merely wasted money. If the technology underperforms while underpinning climate strategies, the world will have gambled its remaining carbon budget on a promise that never materialized.
What if it succeeds?
The IPCC sees the strongest potential in sectors such as cement, steel, and chemicals, which together account for roughly a quarter of global emissions and are difficult to decarbonize by other means.
In long-term scenarios, the IEA projects that carbon removal technologies could reach several billion tons a year by 2050. At that scale, carbon capture could play a meaningful, albeit limited, role.
The problem is not the existence of the technology. It is how it is being used.
Narrowly deployed, with strict limits on enhanced oil recovery and strong regulations on permanent storage, technology might help to decarbonize industries that have few alternatives. Broadly deployed, it risks becoming the most expensive delaying tactic in climate history.
The remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is shrinking by roughly 2% each month, according to Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester. The world does not have time to bet on a technology that primarily serves to extract more of the fuels that are driving the crisis.
