Why Carbon Capture Is Seen as Vital in Climate Fight But Falling Short

The world’s top climate scientists have been clear: If we’re to avoid the most calamitous consequences of warming our planet, we must get as good at taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as we’ve been at putting it in. Even if solar and wind energy largely supplant fossil fuels, holding temperatures down will require capturing large amounts of emissions produced by activities that are hard to decarbonize, such as making cement. It will also require vacuuming huge amounts of carbon from the air. Today, projects devoted to these tasks are far from sufficient to approach those goals. And time is running out for carbon capture technologies to catch up to the challenge.

The world needs to be capturing about 1 gigaton of CO₂ a year by 2030 to be on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above mid-19th century levels, the International Energy Agency estimates. That’s 26 times what’s being removed annually now. And it’s three times what would be captured if all the projects now planned or under construction are operating by 2030. These fall into two main categories: carbon capture and storage and direct air capture.