Stories From The World Of Carbon Capture – The Ups And Downsides

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) stories in the news demonstrate a wide range of opinions about the various technologies and the uncertainty that the solution meets the climate change crisis. Those who view CCS in a positive light tend to be associated with industries that are significant carbon emitters, such as fossil fuel, steel, aluminum, and cement. It is challenging to distinguish between wishful thinking and greenwashing within this group.

From an environmentalist perspective, there is significant pushback and skepticism. Environmentalists see CCS as a means by which industrial polluters get to continue to pump greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. They see CCS as an industry strategy rather than a climate solution, a delaying tactic to postpone the low-carbon economic transition. They point out the cost of existing CCS projects, the delays in implementation, and the amounts of captured carbon to date as being negligible compared to what gets pumped into the air every day.

What is the public stance? Younger people fascinated with technological progress are interested in seeing if CCS works. Low-income groups hope it will work because they are the most impacted by rising global atmospheric temperatures. City dwellers are also in the hopeful group for the same reasons.

The older the age group, the greater the opposition to CCS, with women more skeptical than men because of potential health risks. Farmers and rural populations are skeptical for other reasons, pointing to a likelihood that a CCS facility ends up being built in their backyard. Indigenous groups see CCS as endangering the environment and as an unproven technology that will cause more harm than good.

On the political side, if you are right of centre, you are probably more CCS-friendly. If you are left of centre, you are opposed. Betwixt and between is a muddle of confusion with some pro and some against.

In the past few weeks, all kinds of CCS-related news have appeared in the press.

1. In Canada this week, the Prime Minister put out a list of strategic projects to fast-track. One of them was the Pathways Alliance, the oil sands operators’ proposed US$15 billion solution to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) underground. In the latest news coming from this consortium of companies, it notes that CCS projects in Canada have already securely stored over 50 million tons of CO2.
2. The Carbon Herald, an online industry news source, recently reported that the Dutch portion of the North Sea’s seabed has the capacity to store as much as 3 billion tons of CO2, using empty reservoirs where there are no longer recoverable quantities of natural gas (CH4), and deep underground aquifers. The industry has identified almost 200 offshore gas fields with as many as 130 capable of being converted for CO2 storage.
3. The United Kingdom has estimated that its continental shelf, both on the North and Irish Seas, may be able to hold 78 billion tons of CO2 in now depleted oil fields and seabed underground aquifers. In April 2025, the UK government and Eni, the Italian fossil fuel company, gave approval to a 61-kilometre (38-mile) carbon capture pipeline to transport CO2 from the Liverpool-Manchester region to store the gas permanently beneath the seabed in Liverpool Bay. When operational, it will store 4.5 million tons of CO2 annually with plans to scale to 10 million by 2030. The project build and ongoing support has been costed at £22 billion (US$29.2 billion).
4. At the University of Sharjah, researchers are using shrimp exoskeleton and intestinal waste produced by the seafood industry to capture CO2. Their results are published in the journal Nanoscale, and describe the process of pyrolysis of shrimp waste to produce biochar, followed by acid treatment, chemical activation and ball milling. The resulting activated carbon exhibits strong performance and long-term stability across multiple CO2 capture and release cycles. Can other seafood waste be used? It appears that lobster and crab waste can equally serve as a medium for creating the biochar. The industry produces up to 8 million tons annually, with most of the waste disposed of in landfills or dumped in the ocean, where it is an environmental pollutant.
5. Seabound, a UK company founded in 2021, is approaching CCS in a novel fashion. It is deploying onboard CCS container technology on cargo ships to decarbonize marine shipping by capturing up to 95% of CO2 and 98% of sulphur emissions emitted from ship smokestacks. The technology comes in a container and is proprietary, using a calcium looping system that stores captured greenhouse gases onboard and then offloads them. The current destination for the captured gas is a cement plant in Brevik, Norway, which currently uses the CO2 in its processes to make net-zero concrete.
6. At Harvard University, researchers have invented a method that uses special organic molecules in the presence of sunlight to capture and release CO2 from ambient air, potentially a more efficient and cheaper way for direct air capture (DAC) than what is presently on the market from companies like Canada’s Carbon Engineering, recently acquired by Occidental Petroleum, and Switzerland’s Climeworks. The method developed is far more energy efficient and scalable. The key to the technology is the specially designed complex organic molecules called photobases. When exposed to sunlight, they produce hydroxide ions, changing their chemistry to become a CO2 adsorbent. With light as the trigger, there could be no limit to the amount of CO2 this discovery could capture. Then the only problem is where to release the gas.
7. There are a growing number of DAC companies as of 2025. These include the aforementioned Carbon Engineering and Climeworks, as well as Aerbon, KORALL and UseNexus (Sweden), NuAria, Sora Fuel and South Ocean Air (US), fortyfour (Switzerland), Yama (France), Atalanta Climate (Canada), and Yellow Duck (Japan). Not to get too excited, but the Climeworks Orca plant in Iceland, since it began operation, has only captured 1,000 tons of CO2 annually, although its rated capacity is 4,000 tons. Climeworks’ second plant, called Mammoth, which started operations last year, is rated to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 annually. Other operational DAC plans, of which there are 84, have a combined capacity to capture 569,000 tons of CO2 annually. Compare these paltry numbers to the 37.4 billion tons humans emit annually into the atmosphere.
8. Finally, a new study in Nature questions just how much CO2 can be safely stored using CCS technologies, noting that the capacity is 10 times smaller than previous estimates. The total works out to 1.46 trillion tons, much lower than the 10 to 40 trillion that previous studies have cited. The article states that to meet the Paris climate agreement target, CO2 storage needs to rise to 8.7 billion tons by 2050, or more than 175 times more than our current or planned capacity. So why the discrepancy?  The study points to previous studies not filtering out uncertain geological formations that could leak, trigger earthquakes or contaminate groundwater.  Hence, the much smaller number.

CCS has been promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way for life to continue as normal, giving us the means to have our cake and eat it too. The industry reality is that the current capacity and scale to grow it, despite billions of dollars already invested, are unable to get us even close to where we need to be to mitigate climate change. That’s why converting to low-emitting energy solutions and industrial processes is critical. The fossil fuel industry is greenwashing the public and the governments it seeks funding from for CCS project subsidies, grants, carbon credits and loans with its current propaganda.