Quickly scaling up carbon capture and storage (CCS) operations worldwide to support society’s climate goals requires technological innovations.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from industrial activities or power plants that otherwise would be released into the atmosphere and transporting it to a location where it can be injected deep into underground geological formations for safe, secure, and permanent storage. Driven by societal environmental goals, the need for CCS technologies has never been greater.
Every proposal aimed at reducing emissions put forth by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) highlights the central role that CCS must play — particularly for hard-to-abate but essential sectors like cement, steel, and chemical manufacturing — to meet ambitious climate goals (1, 2). If the availability of CCS is limited, the cost of IEA’s Clean Technology Scenario would increase by 40% (to $13.7 trillion) due to the reliance on more expensive and nascent technologies (3).
To reach the goal of significantly reducing emissions by 2050, the IEA estimates that CCS can contribute approximately 15% of the necessary emissions reductions, but only if the technology is adopted at a scale to capture and sequester 5.6 gigatons per annum (GTA) of CO2 by 2050 (4).
According to the Global CCS Initiative, however, the capacity of CCS projects in operation totaled 49 million tons per annum (MTA) in 2023 (5). This large gap between the actual and required CCS capacity is prompting industries to quickly scale up global efforts and driving the need for innovation in carbon storage technologies.
This article provides a brief overview of the history of CO2 storage in the subsurface, fundamentals of geologic carbon storage, and research undertaken by ExxonMobil in collaboration with leading scientific institutions to help address key technical challenges facing the accelerated deployment of CCS worldwide...
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