Feasible deployment of carbon capture and storage and the requirements of climate targets

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plays a key role in many climate mitigation scenarios and strategies, yet the feasibility of its rapid upscaling has been vigorously debated. Recently, there has been growing interest in CCS and if current plans are realised, global CCS capacity would grow eight-fold from by 2030. However, the bulk of today’s plans are at early stages of development. Can the current push bring CCS “on track” for the Paris climate targets?

Here we address this question by developing a suite of methods for projecting feasible growth of CCS and other policy-driven emerging technologies. In a methodological innovation, we project feasible growth using different feasibility spaces for the different phases of the technology life-cycle: the formative, the acceleration, and the stable growth phase. For each phase, we construct a feasibility space using evidence from past experience of CCS and its historical analogies.

We show that under the most optimistic yet realistic assumptions about the near-term growth of CCS plans and their failure rates, CCS capacity would be 0.37 GtCO2/year by 2030, which is considerably less than most of the 1.5°C-compatible IPCC scenarios. After 2030, CCS could stay on-track for 2°C if it accelerates at least as fast as wind power in the 2000s and then continues growing faster than nuclear power in the 1970s-80s. Only a handful of the existing climate mitigation pathways meet the CCS feasibility constraints and all of them depict <200 GtCO2 captured and stored by 2070, which stands in contrast to the higher end of the amounts envisioned in the current IPCC climate scenarios.

Our findings can be used for setting more realistic targets for CCS as well as informing projections and policies on other emerging climate and energy technologies at early stages of development.