select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
before the headlines
Fiona fox's blog
A study published in Nature Communications looks at the feasibility of underground CO2 storage.
Prof Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, University of Edinburgh, said:
“CO2 storage at massive scale is essential to reduce global heating effects. But IPCC international scientific reports on climate change have greatly overestimated the ability to achieve commercial scale storage. This article confirms earlier work by several authors, with regional analysis of large datasets on storage. That shows the USA needs to take much stronger action, and that China, Indonesia, and south Korea have been greatly over credited with CO2 storage by the IPCC.”
Dr Greg Mutch, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, Newcastle University, said:
“It might be tempting for some to see these results as a reason to dissuade investment in, and deployment of, carbon dioxide storage in favour of e.g., deploying renewable energy generation. This is because the results could be over-simplified to suggest that carbon dioxide storage is infeasible. However, this approach of pitching such technologies against each other is extremely flawed, as both technologies (and others) are non-negotiable aspects of achieving net-zero.
“Therefore, these results should act as a warning that current projections for deployment of carbon dioxide storage have been overly-optimistic due to a variety of technical, geological, financial, political and other factors. We should adjust our expectations for its contribution in the short- to medium-term accordingly.
“This is not to say that carbon dioxide storage cannot contribute as expected in the long-term; it is that we are not on track for it to do so as fast as we had assumed. Therefore, in my opinion, these results should actually act as a stimulus to increase investment in, and deployment of, carbon dioxide storage, particularly in the UK where we are uniquely well-equipped to do so in terms of geology, skills, and expertise.”
Prof Jonathan Gibbins, Professor of Carbon Capture at the University of Sheffield, and Director of the UK CCS Research Community Network+, said:
“What the paper actually says is that very useful amounts of CO2 storage, fairly readily up to 5-6 GtCO2/yr or about 15% of current global CO2 emissions [of ~38 GtCO2/yr] and technically up to 16 GtCO2/yr, over 40% of current global CO2 emissions, can be in use by 2050, but only if the world gets started soon and puts serious effort into its deployment. Also that, even while there is not enough time left now to reach the maximum technically possible CO2 storage rates by 2050, the storage industry could expand by one or two orders of magnitude after 2050 if the need was there, as clearly shown in their Figure 6.
“So the limit is a nearly half-full glass by 2050 and essentially no limits in the longer term, but obviously the ‘glass half empty’ headline that Imperial College have used gets more attention. And finally, anything that involves predicting what rates of construction China can actually achieve may be misleading – they have done some amazing things so far when it comes to industrial development that create CO2 emissions.”
Dr Alaa Al Khourdajie, Research Fellow, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, said:
“The framing of the paper is misleading for 2 reasons:
“Nonetheless, it important to recognise, as the authors rightly highlighted, the annual growth rates to meet these estimates is not something that the industry has achieved in the past.
“Regional results highlighted that many governments, especially in the global north, need to go beyond what their current deployment plans imply in terms of geological storage.
“It is important to flag that geological storage is just one aspect of CCS technologies. The three key components: capture, transport, and storage face unique scale-up challenges. Capture involves improving efficiency and reducing costs of CO2 extraction from various sources, while transport focuses on developing infrastructure for moving large volumes of captured CO2.
“Furthermore, the readiness and challenges vary significantly across different industrial sectors and applications of CCS technologies. Each sector (e.g., power generation, cement production, steel manufacturing) presents distinct technical and economic hurdles.”
‘The feasibility of reaching gigatonne scale CO2 storage by mid-century’ by Yuting Zhang et al. was published in Nature Communications at 10am UK time on Wednesday 28 August 2024.
Declared interests
Greg Mutch: My work is funded by a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, and the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council [grant numbers: EP/V047078/1, EP/W03395X/1, EP/Y034961/1]. I am also an academic member of the UK Carbon Capture & Storage Research Centre, and I sat on the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy, & Industrial Strategy Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage Early Career Professional’s Forum.
Jonathan Gibbins: no direct COI that I can think of
Alaa Al Khourdajie:
Stuart Haszeldine is funded by government grants from European Union, from and UKRI; he advises Scottish and UK government energy Departments, and serves as a member of the UK CCUS Council.