Concerns over CCS as a climate solution
In concept, carbon capture and storage (CCS) sounds like it is a ready-solution to our climate crisis.  All one needs to do to keep "business as usual" is to capture CO2 at the source, compress it into a liquid and transport it via pipeline to an approved sequestration site, where it will be injected deep underground for permanent storage.

But in reality, it has never been tested at the scale proposed, keeps the fossil fuel industry alive, and brings with it many unanswered questions and potential risks and harms to people, land, and water.

Why carbon capture and storage (CCS) is NOT a climate solution

• Carbon capture keeps fossil fuel plants running, at a time when we need to keep them in the ground. Putting carbon capture technology on greenhouse-gas emitting facilities enables those facilities to continue operating and polluting indefinitely. CCS projects have not captured the percent of emissions promised, and failed to address other harmful pollution from fuel combustion, such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5).

• Carbon capture is extremely energy intensive. It requires building a new power plant to run the system, creating another source of air and carbon pollution - or requires an existing plant to run harder and more often. That undermines the whole goal of capturing carbon in the first place. The additional energy required to power the carbon capture process generates even more emissions if supplied by fossil fuels.

• Running carbon capture equipment on a fossil fuel plant is extremely water intensive. According to a Front End Engineering Study prepared for the Prairie State coal plant in Marissa, Illinois, operating carbon capture that plant would require 14.6 million gallons of water each day. That is the same amount of water consumed daily by residents of Ann Arbor, Michigan!

• A CO2 pipeline rupture can expose humans to high concentrations of CO2, a toxic asphyxiant that can lead to convulsions, comma and even death, depending the length exposure. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration recognizes these hazards and has implemented rulemaking to improve safety and oversight. The CO2 pipeline rupture that took place near Satartia, Mississippi in February, 2020 and leak that occurred in Sulphur, Louisiana in April 2024 highlight the seriousness of these risks.

• The buildout of CCS infrastructure presents serious health, safety, and environmental risks, particularly for marginalized communities, already overburdened by industrial hazards. This can include increased air pollution and exposure to toxic CO2 if a pipeline leaks or ruptures. We have seen that on the south side of Peoria, Illinois a U.S. EPA-designated Environmental Justice Community, where a CO2 pipeline from the BioUrja ethanol plant was proposed to pass through that community.

• Long-term storage of CO2 is risky and unproven. CO2 can leak from storage sites via injection wells, faults or fissures, or abandoned wells, and contaminate drinking water with toxic heavy metals such as: arsenic, antimony, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, selenium and many more. People that consume high levels of heavy metals risk acute and chronic toxicity, liver, kidney, and intestinal damage, anemia, and cancer. Leaking CO2 also can contaminate soil, reducing crop yield, and accumulate in low-lying areas where it displaces oxygen, placing humans and animals at risk..

• CCS can increase greenhouse gas emissions if it is used for CO2 enhanced oil recovery, which produces oil that will be burned. It also diverts funding from renewable energy, energy efficiency, and biological sequestration that we know can help us meet climate targets.

• Carbon capture, transport, and storage is expensive, and can't be carried out at the scale currently proposed without massive public subsidies. Although tax credits for CCS have been around since 2008, it was the Biden Administration's Inflation Reduction Act that mad CCS profitable when it increased 45Q by 70 percent ($85 per ton for storage and $60 per tone for EOR).

From the experts
Here is what others are saying:

• Mark Jacobson, Stanford, wrote an opinion piece noting that the Biden Administration's carbon capture funding actually incentivizes more emissions and higher costs.

• The Institute for Economy, Energy, and Financial Analysis says carbon capture and storage (CCS) has often been hailed as a potential game-changer in the fight against climate change, but its history is full of over-promising and under-delivering, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

• The Center of Biological Diversity says carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a dangerous delay tactic championed by the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to continue business-as-usual while taking resources away from the needed transition to clean, cheaper renewable energy.

• The International Energy Agency claims that large amounts of carbon capture as a solution is an ‘illusion’. (Michelle Lewis, Electrec). If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C would require an “entirely inconceivable” 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilization or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture.

• More than 500 organizations who signed a letter to policy makers in Canada and the U.S. in 2021, authored by the Center for International Environmental Law. "Carbon capture and storage is not a climate solution. It is a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who created the climate emergency."