How much industrial carbon have we buried? Much less than thought
Industrial plants that burn fossil fuels emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide, which can be captured and stored to prevent it from reaching the atmosphere. But an analysis suggests that the most authoritative reports on carbon capture overestimate the amount of gas trapped in storage facilities1.
Evaluating the success of carbon capture is difficult: companies that sequester CO2 by injecting it underground take diverse approaches to measuring how much gas they lock away, and the think tank that provides the most thorough statistics on carbon capture reports data that are based on storage capacity rather than the actual amount of carbon sequestered.
For a better picture, Yuting Zhang and her colleagues at Imperial College London examined CO2 storage rates between 1996 and 2020 at 20 of the 26 existing carbon-capture facilities worldwide, such as the Sleipner project in the North Sea. The authors used publicly available data to calculate storage amounts, and estimated that the facilities stored 197 megatonnes of CO2 over the 24-year period. This suggests that reports overestimate the amount of CO2 stored by 19–30%.
The authors call for reporting methods to be standardized to allow accurate monitoring of this climate-change mitigation strategy.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02025-y
References
Zhang, Y., Jackson, C. & Krevor, S. Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00296 (2022).
