Our website uses cookies to enhance and personalize your experience and to display advertisements (if any). Our website may also include third party cookies such as Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Youtube. By using the website, you consent to the use of cookies. We have updated our Privacy Policy. Please click the button to view our Privacy Policy.

Ok, I accept
International

Navigating Carbon Capture Technology

Amelia Reed
When carbon capture helps and when it distracts


Carbon capture is not a single technology or policy; it is a family of approaches that remove carbon dioxide from flue gases or directly from the air and then either store it permanently underground, use it in products, or inject it in ways that temporarily retain CO2. Whether carbon capture helps or distracts depends on purpose, timing, scale, governance, and economics. Below is a clear assessment of the contexts where carbon capture is a constructive tool and where it creates risks of delay, waste, or greenwashing.

How carbon capture can help

  • Decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries: Cement, steel, chemicals, and some high-temperature industrial processes emit CO2 as a process byproduct rather than from energy use. Capturing these point-source emissions is often one of the most practical ways to reach net-zero for those sectors.
  • Removing residual emissions: After maximal energy efficiency, electrification, and fuel switching, some residual CO2 emissions remain. Permanent removal technologies (direct air capture, bioenergy with CCS) can offset those hard-to-eliminate residuals and enable net-negative emissions where needed to meet climate targets.
  • Enabling low-carbon fuels and hydrogen: Capturing CO2 from natural gas reforming combined with storage can produce lower-carbon hydrogen (so-called blue hydrogen) as a transitional supply while renewable-based hydrogen (green hydrogen) scales up. This is helpful when hydrogen demand is urgent and renewables or electrolyzer capacity are limited.
  • Demonstrated successful storage cases: Operational projects show technical feasibility. Norway’s Sleipner project has stored roughly 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year in a saline aquifer since the mid-1990s. Projects like the UK and Norway-led Northern Lights facility demonstrate shared transport and storage infrastructure can be built at scale.
  • When backed by robust policy and finance: Carbon pricing, tax credits, grants, and regulated emissions reductions make projects viable and ensure capture is additional to—not a substitute for—emissions cuts. Well-designed incentives direct capture where it achieves the most climate benefit.

How carbon capture distracts

  • Delaying emissions reductions: Relying on capture as a promise to fix future emissions can allow continued investment in fossil infrastructure. Capture with weak safeguards can become an excuse to defer energy efficiency, electrification, or fuel switching.
  • Subsidizing counterproductive fossil activity: When capture is coupled with enhanced oil recovery (EOR), captured CO2 can boost oil production. That creates a perverse result: more oil extracted and burned may outweigh the CO2 stored, especially if accounting is weak.
  • High cost and limited near-term scale: Many capture approaches are expensive. Point-source capture costs vary widely but can be tens to low hundreds of dollars per tonne; direct air capture (DAC) costs have been hundreds of dollars per tonne at commercial demonstration scale. That makes capture a poor substitute for lower-cost emissions reductions in many sectors.
  • Energy penalty and lifecycle emissions: Capture systems require energy. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, the net climate benefit shrinks. Capture can reduce plant efficiency by a significant fraction, increasing fuel use and operating costs.
  • Questionable permanence and monitoring: Geological storage requires long-term monitoring to ensure CO2 remains sequestered. Projects with weak monitoring, unclear liability, or poor public engagement risk leakage concerns and community opposition.
  • BECCS land-use and sustainability risks: Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) can produce net-negative emissions on paper but may cause land-use change, biodiversity loss, food competition, and uncertain carbon accounting if biomass sourcing is not rigorously managed.

Illustrative cases and outcomes

  • Sleipner (Norway): A long-standing case of effective offshore storage, where since 1996 roughly 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year have been injected into a saline formation, showcasing decades of secure containment and ongoing monitoring.
  • Boundary Dam (Canada): A coal plant retrofit that captures about 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually, demonstrating that such upgrades can be technically achieved while also exposing substantial capital demands, operational hurdles, and the challenge of competing with more affordable low‑carbon options such as renewables.
  • Petra Nova (USA): A project that captured more than a million tonnes per year from a coal facility but was paused due to economic pressures and low oil prices, underscoring how financial conditions and policy frameworks shape project longevity.
  • Gorgon (Australia): A major industrial CCS development linked to natural gas processing that initially struggled to meet its storage goals and highlighted the operational and measurement difficulties inherent in large subsurface endeavors.
  • Climeworks DAC plants (Iceland, Switzerland): Orca in Iceland and subsequent facilities illustrate that DAC functions reliably at modest scale, handling thousands to tens of thousands of tonnes per year, while cost and energy requirements remain the key obstacles to accelerating growth to the gigatonne range.

Costs, scale, and timelines

  • Cost ranges: Capturing CO2 directly at industrial facilities can run from several tens to the low hundreds of dollars per tonne, influenced by CO2 concentration levels and how complex the retrofit is. Current DAC operations often exceed a few hundred dollars per tonne, though many projections anticipate lower costs as deployment expands, expertise grows, and low-carbon energy becomes more affordable.
  • Scale gap: Climate pathways that depend significantly on negative emissions envision expansive use of BECCS and DAC by midcentury. Reaching gigatonne-level removal demands swift, long-term commitments to build out manufacturing capacity, transport pipelines, suitable storage reservoirs, and renewable power to sustain capture systems.
  • Timing matters: Cutting emissions now through efficiency upgrades, electrification, and renewable energy yields immediate climate gains. Carbon capture can reinforce these efforts but cannot replace the need for rapid and substantial early reductions.

Practical decision framework: when to use carbon capture

  • Prioritize reductions first: Exhaust low-cost options—efficiency, electrification, material substitution—before relying on capture.
  • Use capture where alternatives are limited: Favor industrial process emissions and chemical feedstocks where abatement options are scarce.
  • Prefer permanent storage with strong monitoring: Ensure projects commit to verified, long-term geological storage with independent monitoring and clear liability rules.
  • Avoid coupling with EOR unless strict accounting exists: When capture funds oil production, require transparent lifecycle accounting to ensure net climate benefit.
  • Design policy to prevent delay: Condition subsidies on demonstrated reductions, time-limited support, and a clear pathway off fossil dependence.
  • Safeguard land and supply chains for BECCS: Only deploy biomass-based capture with strict sustainability criteria to avoid negative biodiversity and food security impacts.

Key priorities for policy and governance

  • Clear accounting rules: Rigorous, transparent measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) are essential so captured CO2 is not double-counted or used to justify ongoing emissions.
  • Long-term liability and monitoring: Governments and project sponsors must clarify who is responsible for stored CO2 over decades and centuries.
  • Targeted incentives: Financial support should favor projects that deliver maximum climate benefit per dollar and that do not lock in fossil infrastructure.
  • Community engagement and social license: Local communities must be consulted, informed, and compensated where projects carry land-use or safety risks.

Compromises to acknowledge and address

  • Infrastructure needs: Pipelines, transport routes, storage facilities, and the energy required for capture demand both time and significant funding, so planning should reflect overall future demand and encourage shared hubs to lower expenses.
  • Energy supply: Capture operations have to rely on low-carbon power to maintain their climate advantages; without it, overall emissions cuts diminish or may even be undone.
  • Risk of capture reliance: Policymakers need to weigh funding for capture against quicker and more economical emission reduction options to prevent costly long-term dependency.

Carbon capture is a pragmatic tool when applied to specific problems: removing unavoidable process emissions, permanently storing residual CO2, and decarbonizing sectors with few alternatives. Its benefits are real but conditional on rigorous accounting, secure long-term storage, strong policy design, and prioritizing reductions first. Where capture becomes politically convenient or financially attractive to prop up fossil fuels, it distracts from the urgent transformations that cut emissions at source. Responsible deployment means choosing projects that maximize climate benefit, sequencing capture after aggressive mitigation, and building transparency and safeguards so that captured carbon truly advances rather than delays the transition to a low-carbon economy.

By Amelia Reed

All rights reserved.