Written by Rokas Beresniovas
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is receiving renewed attention. With billions of dollars in subsidies flowing from the Inflation Reduction Act and high-profile backing from major fossil fuel companies, CCS is being touted as a critical solution to the climate crisis.
The central idea is simple: continue burning fossil fuels but capture the carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere, then store it safely underground. On paper, it sounds like a technological fix that allows us to maintain our energy habits while reducing emissions.
But the reality is far more complicated—and far less promising. Today, CCS is not solving the climate crisis. In most cases, it’s exacerbating it. The majority of carbon capture projects in the United States are not focused on reducing emissions. Instead, they are designed for enhanced oil recovery—a process where captured CO₂ is injected into aging oil fields to extract more oil. Rather than being a genuine mitigation strategy, this use of CCS increases the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a circular process that captures carbon in order to release even more, and it’s being funded, in part, with public dollars.
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Some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world—ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum—are leading the charge on CCS, promoting it as evidence of their climate commitment. At the same time, they continue expanding fossil fuel operations.
These companies receive generous tax credits, up to $85 per ton for carbon permanently stored and $60 per ton for carbon used in oil recovery. Without strong accountability measures, these incentives function as subsidies for fossil fuel expansion, not decarbonization. That’s the heart of the criticism many scientists, policy experts, and environmental groups level against CCS: it’s not just ineffective in practice, it’s being used to delay the transition we need.
Even the more advanced forms of carbon capture, like direct air capture and mineralization, are still in the early stages and come at a steep cost. The Orca facility in Iceland, often cited as a model, captures just a few thousand tons of CO₂ annually—a drop in the bucket compared to global emissions. The price tag for this process is currently over $1,000 per ton, which makes it financially unviable as a scalable solution in the near term. These technologies may have a role to play in the long-term future for sectors that are hard to decarbonize, but they are not a substitute for immediate, large-scale emissions reductions.
There’s also a serious concern around the permanence of carbon storage. While industry proponents suggest that CO₂ can be safely stored underground, the science is not so certain. Pressurized carbon dioxide behaves as a supercritical fluid—it’s buoyant and mobile. It can migrate through rock fractures and porous formations.
The failure of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in the U.S. shows how difficult it is to guarantee the permanent containment of hazardous material underground. What happens if, after decades, the carbon leaks back into the atmosphere? What happens if we’ve already spent billions and lost precious time?
Critics of CCS are not opposed to innovation—they are opposed to delay. There’s a long history of fossil fuel companies using unproven technologies to create the illusion of progress. In this case, CCS is being used not to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but to justify continued investment in them. That’s why many experts consider it greenwashing. Some go further, calling it a form of fraud—not necessarily in the legal sense, but in the moral one. It’s a false promise that distracts from real, scalable climate solutions.
Those real solutions are already here. Renewable electricity generation—particularly from solar and wind—is now the most affordable form of new energy in many parts of the world. Battery storage is advancing rapidly. Electrifying transportation and heating systems, improving energy efficiency in buildings, modernizing our electric grid—these are proven strategies that cut emissions, reduce costs, and improve public health. They don’t need speculative fixes or complex infrastructure to scale. What they need is consistent investment, smart policy, and political will.
We are in a decisive decade. The IPCC has warned that we must cut global emissions nearly in half by 2030 to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change. That doesn’t leave room for distractions. It doesn’t leave time for experiments that may never scale. Every dollar and every year we spend propping up ineffective solutions is a missed opportunity to invest in the transition we already know how to build.
Carbon capture may have a role in the future, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors. But it is not a climate solution today—not in the way it’s being implemented, not at the scale it’s being promised, and not with the incentives currently attached to it. If we’re serious about solving the climate crisis, we need to stop subsidizing delay and start funding transformation. Carbon shouldn’t be captured after it’s burned—it should be left in the ground.