You've seen the headlines. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the techno-fix that will let us burn fossil fuels and still hit our climate goals. Governments are pouring billions into it. Oil companies champion it. But here's the dirty secret the glossy reports skip over: most CCS projects fail to deliver on their promises, often spectacularly. They underperform, get cancelled, or become stranded assets. This isn't about a few bad apples; it's about fundamental flaws in the technology's physics, economics, and real-world application. Let's cut through the hype and look at the seven core reasons why CCS, in its current form, simply doesn't work at the scale and reliability we need.

1. The Efficiency Trap: You Use More Fuel to Capture CO2

The first law of thermodynamics isn't a suggestion. Capturing CO2 from a flue gas stream requires energy—a lot of it. For a typical coal-fired power plant using amine-based scrubbing (the most common method), the energy penalty is between 20-30%. Think about that. To capture the CO2 from a 500 MW plant, you need to build an extra 100-150 MW of capacity just to run the capture process. You're literally burning more coal to clean up the coal you're already burning.

This isn't a minor engineering tweak away from being solved. It's inherent to the process of separating a dilute gas (CO2 is often less than 15% of flue gas) from a mixture, then compressing it into a liquid for transport. That compression alone can consume 10% of a plant's output.

The result? A plant with CCS has a significantly higher operating cost and, paradoxically, often a higher total CO2 footprint per unit of electricity if you consider the full lifecycle of mining and transporting the extra fuel. The capture process itself can become a major emission source if its energy comes from fossil fuels.

2. Capture is Only Half the Battle. Transport & Storage is the Other 90% of the Problem.

Media loves the shiny "capture" hardware. But capturing the CO2 is the (relatively) easy part. Then you have to deal with it.

You now have a highly pressurized, corrosive fluid that needs to move. This means building a dedicated pipeline network, a feat of infrastructure comparable to the existing oil and gas pipeline system. Each mile is millions in capital, plus rights-of-way, safety monitoring, and leak detection systems. For a country without this network (i.e., most of them), the cost is prohibitive.

And where does it go? You need specific geology: depleted oil/gas fields or deep saline aquifers with a perfect, non-porous cap rock (like shale) to act as a lid. These sites aren't next door to power plants. The famed Sleipner project in the North Sea works because it's on top of a perfect aquifer. Most places aren't so lucky.

3. Storage: A 1,000-Year Geologic Gamble

This is the part that keeps geologists up at night. We're proposing to inject billions of tons of buoyant, potentially acidic fluid underground and assume it will stay there for millennia. The confidence comes from computer models. Reality is messier.

• Unknown Pathways: Old, abandoned oil wells (there are over 3 million in the US alone) can become conduits. Seismic activity can fracture cap rock.
• Leakage Nullifies the Benefit: A 1% annual leakage rate from a storage site means the climate benefit is gone in a century. Monitoring for slow, diffuse leakage over such vast areas and timeframes is an unprecedented challenge.
• Who's Liable in 2200? The legal framework for perpetual stewardship doesn't exist. No company will accept infinite liability. This risk ultimately transfers to the public.

4. The Economic Black Hole

CCS is ferociously expensive, and not in a "it'll get cheaper with scale" way like solar panels. The costs are in custom-built, heavy industrial plants, pipelines, and intensive monitoring.

Compare these costs to the current price of carbon in most markets ($10-$80/ton). The math doesn't close without huge, permanent government subsidies. The Kemper County "clean coal" project in Mississippi is the poster child: a $7.5 billion boondoggle that never captured commercial CO2 and was converted back to a regular gas plant. Investors lost billions.

5. The Scale Illusion & The Small Emitter Problem

CCS talk focuses on massive point sources: coal plants, steel mills. But look at a global emissions pie chart. A huge slice comes from distributed, smaller sources: millions of cars, planes, ships, home furnaces, and medium-sized factories.

CCS is utterly useless here. You can't put a capture unit on a car or a commercial airliner. The infrastructure to collect CO2 from millions of decentralized points is a physical and economic fantasy. Advocates hand-wave this away, hoping biofuels or hydrogen will solve transport. But for industrial heat and process emissions from smaller plants, CCS is a non-starter. The capital cost is too high for a single factory to bear.

So even if CCS worked perfectly at every suitable large site, it would still only address a fraction of the problem. It's not a systemic solution; it's a boutique fix for a handful of facilities.

6. The Policy & Accounting Fantasy

Much of the projected "success" of CCS relies on creative accounting and future promises.

• Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR): Over 80% of captured CO2 today is used for EOR. It's pumped into aging oil fields to squeeze out more crude. This is not storage; it's a fossil fuel production technique. The additional oil burned creates more CO2 than is typically stored. Net result: increased emissions.
• "Blue" Hydrogen: The new darling. This involves reforming natural gas into hydrogen, capturing the CO2 byproduct, and calling the hydrogen "low-carbon." Capture rates are often assumed to be 90-95% in models. Real-world facilities struggle to hit 70% consistently, and they don't capture emissions from upstream methane leaks. "Blue" hydrogen can be worse for the climate than just burning the gas directly.
• Delayed Accountability: CCS provides a narrative of "we're working on it," allowing continued investment in fossil infrastructure today, with the capture promised for "sometime before 2040." It's a delay tactic.

7. The Ultimate Failure: The Moral Hazard

The most profound reason CCS doesn't work is psychological and political. It functions as the ultimate moral hazard. It tells politicians, industries, and the public that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels aggressively. We can have our cake and eat it too. Just capture it later!

This illusion drains urgency, capital, and political will from the actual solutions: scaling renewables, modernizing grids, electrifying everything, and improving efficiency. It's a distraction technology, promising a future fix to justify present inaction. Billions that could be spent deploying solar farms, heat pumps, and public transit are funneled into speculative CCS projects that, at best, will marginally reduce emissions from a few plants.

Your CCS Questions Answered

Can CCS ever work for small-scale emission sources like factories?

Almost certainly not, and that's a critical flaw in the net-zero narrative. The economics are brutal. Capturing CO2 from a small or mid-sized plant requires building a custom, miniaturized capture facility right next to it. The capital cost per ton of CO2 captured is astronomical because you lose all economies of scale. You're looking at capture costs easily exceeding $150/ton, with no pipeline infrastructure nearby to transport it. Most factories would simply shut down rather than bear that cost. This is why CCS advocates focus almost exclusively on massive point sources—it ignores the vast majority of industrial emissions.

Is the risk of CO2 leaking from underground storage a real concern or exaggerated?

It's a very real, under-discussed engineering and liability nightmare. We're talking about injecting millions of tons of buoyant, potentially acidic gas under pressure for centuries. Seismic activity can create new fractures. Old, unmapped oil & gas wells can become conduits. A sudden, large-scale leak is a low-probability but high-consequence event. The bigger issue is slow, undetected leakage over decades, which nullifies the climate benefit. Who monitors the site for 500 years? Who pays for it? The legal and financial framework for this perpetual stewardship simply doesn't exist.

Does a higher carbon price automatically make CCS viable?

No, this is a dangerous oversimplification. A carbon price makes avoiding the cost of emissions more expensive, but it doesn't magically solve CCS's technical hurdles. If your capture technology only works at 70% efficiency with high energy penalties, a carbon tax just makes your expensive process slightly less expensive relative to paying the tax. The core problems—energy use, water consumption, solvent degradation—remain. In many cases, it's still cheaper for a company to pay the carbon tax than to run a finicky, capital-intensive CCS plant. A carbon price is a necessary economic signal, but it is not a silver bullet for a technology that is fundamentally inefficient.

Are there any cases where CCS might make sense?

Maybe in a few, very niche applications as a bridge technology. Think specific, hard-to-abate industrial processes where CO2 is a pure byproduct of a chemical reaction (not combustion), like in cement or ammonia production, and where a suitable storage site is literally next door. But even there, it's a costly last resort, not a first choice. The primary focus must be on fundamentally changing the process to not emit CO2 in the first place (e.g., alternative cement chemistries, green hydrogen for ammonia). Relying on CCS for these sectors is betting on a complex, expensive cleanup operation instead of innovating for true cleanliness.