Urgent Support Needed for Carbon Capture and Storage to Achieve the Paris Climate Goals

An urgent increase in policy support and investment for carbon capture and storage (CCS) is needed to achieve the Paris climate goals, according to researchers at Princeton University and The University of Queensland. The researchers said investment must be directed to understand how quickly CO₂ can be injected and stored underground at a local /regional level.

The study's lead author, Joe Lane, a former postdoctoral research associate in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, said CCS is regarded as a key technology for reducing energy and industrial sector emissions and for achieving negative emissions when coupled with bioenergy or direct air capture of carbon dioxide.

"Most scenarios for deep decarbonization of the global economy rely on massive scale CCS to be compliant with the Paris Agreement - from three to more than 20 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year being captured and stored, world-wide by 2050," Lane said. "Currently, about 0.04 gigatonnes of CO₂ are captured and injected underground each year."

Co-author Professor Andrew Garnett, the UQ Centre for Natural Gas Director, said more information is needed globally to support such high expectations and that even the lower targets imply an extremely challenging pace and scale of CCS deployment across all major economies. According to Garnett, those scenarios typically assume that there is more than enough storage volume available in porous geological reservoirs around the world, but more important than available storage by volume is the rate at which CO₂ can be safely injected and permanently contained.

Co-author Chris Greig, the Theodora D. '78 & William H. Walton III '74 Senior Research Scientist at Princeton's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, said storage uncertainty creates a "chicken and egg" problem for CCS ambitions. "The characterisation work required to build confidence in storage capacity at these scales relies on mobilising tens of billions of dollars in risk capital over the next decade," Greig said.

Currently, these characterization capabilities are in the oil and gas sector. He said that for the necessary investment to happen, storage developers need to be confident that the capture projects will actually be built before they enter into long term storage contracts.

"At the same time, investors will remain cautious until there's a high level of confidence that cost-effective storage capacity will be available," said Greig.

Lane said strategic planning is needed now if carbon dioxide storage is to play a major role for decarbonising crucial industries and the developing world.

The study is published in Nature Climate Change (DOI 10.1038/s41558-021-01175-7).