Carbon capture and storage (CCS) gets headlines as a climate savior. Politicians love it. Fossil fuel companies champion it. But after looking at the data and talking to engineers in the field, I’ve come away skeptical. The drawbacks of carbon capture are substantial, often glossed over in press releases. It’s not a magic wand. It’s a complex, expensive, and energy-hungry industrial process with real limits and risks.

Let’s cut through the hype. If you’re wondering whether CCS is worth the massive investment, you need to understand these seven critical challenges.

1. The Massive Energy Penalty

This is the biggest technical drawback that doesn't get enough airtime. Capturing CO2 is incredibly energy-intensive.

Think about it. You're taking a dilute gas (CO2 in flue gas is often less than 15%) and separating it, compressing it to a liquid, and pumping it underground. The most common method, amine scrubbing, requires heating the solvent to release the captured CO2. All that heat and compression has to come from somewhere.

I spoke to a project manager at a pilot plant who was blunt: "Our capture unit is like adding another small power plant just to run itself. The parasitic load is a killer for the economics."

2. Sky-High Costs and Funding Gaps

Let's talk money. CCS is expensive. We're talking capital costs in the billions for a single commercial-scale project. The operating costs are also persistent.

Here’s a breakdown of where the money goes, based on analysis from the Global CCS Institute and the International Energy Agency (IEA):

For comparison, the current price of carbon in most markets is far below this. That's why nearly every operational CCS project relies heavily on government subsidies or enhanced oil recovery (EOR), where the CO2 is sold to pump more oil out of old wells. It's a financial model that's hard to scale globally.

3. Long-Term Storage Risks and Liability

"Permanent" storage is the promise. The reality is more uncertain. We're talking about injecting billions of tonnes of pressurized fluid into underground rock formations.

The main risks aren't Hollywood-style catastrophic explosions. They're slower and trickier:

• Leakage: CO2 could migrate through unknown faults or cracks, eventually seeping back into the atmosphere or ocean. Even a 1% annual leak rate would make the storage pointless for climate goals over a century.
• Induced Seismicity: Injecting fluid can lubricate faults and cause small earthquakes. While usually minor, they could compromise the seal of the storage reservoir.
• The Liability Question: This is a huge one. Who is responsible if something goes wrong in 50 or 100 years? The company that injected it may be long gone. Governments are hesitant to take on this open-ended liability, creating a major barrier to investment.

Monitoring these sites for centuries is a burden we haven't fully figured out how to pay for or manage.

4. The Immense Scale Problem

To make a dent in global emissions, CCS would need to operate at a mind-boggling scale. We emit about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 annually from energy and industry.

Let's say we aim to capture just 10% of that. That's 3.7 billion tonnes per year. The world's largest existing facility, the Quest plant in Canada, captures about 1 million tonnes annually.

Do the math. We would need 3,700 Quest-sized plants. The infrastructure for this—the pipelines, the injection wells, the monitoring networks—is almost unimaginable. It would be one of the largest construction projects in human history, requiring trillions in investment and decades to build, all while we need to be rapidly cutting emissions now.

5. The "Moral Hazard" and Delay Tactic

This is the most contentious social and political drawback. Critics argue that promoting CCS as a solution creates a "moral hazard." It allows polluters and policymakers to avoid the harder task of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

I've seen this firsthand in policy discussions. The conversation shifts from "How do we phase out this coal plant?" to "How do we retrofit it with CCS?" The latter extends the plant's life, locks in more fossil infrastructure, and sucks up public funding that could have gone to renewables, grid storage, or efficiency.

It becomes a license to keep polluting, with the promise of a future fix. That's a dangerous delay tactic we can't afford.

6. Water Use and Environmental Trade-offs

CCS isn't happening in a vacuum. It has real, local environmental impacts that often get overlooked in the global climate conversation.

• Water Consumption: Many capture technologies, especially in power plants, require significant cooling water. In water-stressed regions, this creates a direct conflict with communities and agriculture.
• Chemical Solvents: Amines and other capture solvents can degrade into potentially harmful by-products that need careful management and disposal.
• Land Use for Pipelines: A massive CO2 pipeline network would cut across landscapes, with associated rights-of-way and potential safety concerns for nearby communities.

It's not a clean solution. It swaps one set of environmental problems for another.

7. It Doesn't Solve Everything (The "Hard-to-Abate" Debate)

Proponents rightly say CCS is crucial for "hard-to-abate" sectors like cement and steel production, where process emissions are inherent to the chemistry.

But here's the nuance everyone misses: it's a poor solution for coal and gas power generation. Why build a $1 billion+ CCS unit on a gas plant when the levelized cost of wind and solar-plus-storage is now cheaper? It makes zero economic sense. CCS should be reserved for industries that genuinely have no other path to decarbonization, not as a blanket fix for the power sector.

The Boundary Dam project in Canada, a CCS retrofit on a coal plant, is a cautionary tale. It's been plagued with reliability issues, rarely hitting its capture targets, and is wildly uneconomical without subsidies. We're learning the hard way that retrofitting old infrastructure is often harder than building new, clean systems.

So, where does this leave us? Carbon capture technology has a role, but it's a narrow, expensive, and risky one. Its primary value is in decarbonizing specific industrial processes where alternatives don't exist. Pouring vast public resources into using it to prolong the life of coal and gas power plants is a strategic error.

The drawbacks of carbon capture—the energy penalty, the cost, the scale, the moral hazard—are profound. They tell us that our first, best, and fastest strategy must be to stop emitting in the first place: conserve energy, shift to renewables, and redesign processes. CCS should be a tool of last resort, not a centerpiece of our climate plan. Betting the planet on it is a gamble we probably can't win.