Carbon Capture Has Bigger Problems Than Storage Space
There’s a limit to how much we can bury, but we’re a long way from there.
In the all-white moonscape of a lime factory in northern France, a major CO2 emitter, a start-up is testing its carbon capture and solidification technology,
Photographer: SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFPIt’s always important to remember that many resources on our planet are finite. A new study rams home the message in carbon storage, claiming that there’s almost 10 times less safe, practical space to bury carbon than originally thought. It’s yet another warning of the limits of this approach to battling emissions.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is widely agreed to be essential for achieving our climate goals both via taking the emissions from a point source such as power plants or cement-manufacturing facilities, or removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with machines like Climeworks’s Mammoth in Iceland.