Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is often presented as a critical tool for hitting net-zero targets. Headlines tout its potential to "decarbonize" heavy industry and fossil power. But after looking closely at the engineering and economics for years, I've found the conversation is missing a crucial half. The negatives of carbon capture are substantial, systemic, and often sidelined in the optimism.

It's not a magic wand. It's a complex, expensive industrial process with real trade-offs.

The Prohibitive Cost Problem: Who Really Pays?

Let's start with the biggest hurdle: money. CCS is astronomically expensive, and this isn't a "it'll get cheaper with scale" hand-wave. The costs are baked into the physics and chemistry.

Consider the retrofit of a coal plant. You're not just adding a filter. You need massive new infrastructure: giant absorption towers, kilometers of piping, powerful compressors, and a dedicated energy supply to run it all. The Petra Nova project in Texas—one of the world's largest—cost over $1 billion. It captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, but even that revenue stream wasn't enough; the project was idled in 2020 due to poor economics.

Where does this money come from? Almost always, the public purse.

The argument that costs will plummet like solar did is flawed. Solar PV benefited from mass manufacturing of standardized modules. Every CCS project is a bespoke engineering challenge, tied to a specific plant's flue gas and local geology. The learning curve is slower and flatter.

The Energy and Resource Penalty

This is the most underappreciated negative. Capturing CO2 is incredibly energy-intensive.

The dominant amine-based chemical absorption process requires heat—a lot of it, usually steam at over 100°C—to "regenerate" the solvent and release the pure CO2. Then you have to compress that CO2 to a supercritical state for transport, which takes more power.

The math is sobering. A plant with CCS might need to burn 20-25% more fuel to deliver the same net amount of electricity to the grid. This creates a cascade of other problems:

• More upstream emissions: More coal mining, more gas extraction, with all their associated methane leaks and land disruption.
• More local pollution: Burning 20% more fuel often means 20% more air pollutants like NOx and SOx, unless you also significantly upgrade other pollution controls.
• Water use: CCS systems, especially cooling for compression, can double a plant's water consumption. In water-stressed regions, this is a deal-breaker.

It's an environmental trade-off, not a pure win.

The Scaling and Infrastructure Nightmare

Let's talk scale. To make a dent in global emissions, we'd need to capture billions of tons of CO2 annually. The current global capacity is a rounding error.

Building this out isn't like deploying solar panels. It requires a massive, synchronized build-out of three separate mega-industries:

1. Capture facilities at thousands of individual point sources.
2. A vast pipeline network rivaling today's natural gas infrastructure to move compressed CO2.
3. Gigantic, secure geological storage sites with proven capacity and monitoring protocols.

Each piece faces massive NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) opposition. Nobody wants a CO2 pipeline running through their town, recalling the tragic Satartia, Mississippi pipeline rupture in 2020. Nobody wants to be the permanent dumping ground for the world's carbon waste.

The permitting and legal hurdles alone could take decades. By which time, renewables and storage might have made the whole endeavor obsolete.

The Risk of Leakage and Long-Term Liability

"Permanent" storage is a strong word when we're talking about geological timescales. The risk of leakage is low, but the consequences of being wrong are catastrophic—both for the climate and for human safety.

CO2 is an asphyxiant in high concentrations. A rapid, large-scale leak from a storage reservoir—while unlikely—could pool in low-lying areas with deadly effect, as seen in the natural disaster at Lake Nyos. More probable are slow, chronic leaks that slowly undo the climate benefit and acidify local groundwater.

Then there's the accounting risk. Verification of stored CO2 is complex. Over-crediting or poor monitoring can make CCS a paper exercise that doesn't deliver real atmospheric benefit. If the captured CO2 is used for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)—which pumps it underground to squeeze out more crude—the net climate benefit hinges on careful lifecycle analysis. Often, it's marginal or even negative if that extra oil is burned.

The Moral Hazard Dilemma: Does CCS Delay the Real Transition?

This is the most profound negative, and it's psychological and political. CCS risks becoming a "get out of jail free" card for the fossil fuel industry and carbon-intensive sectors.

It creates a powerful narrative: "Don't worry, we can keep the plants running, just add a capture unit later." This narrative siphons away urgency, investment, and political will from the harder but more definitive task: replacing fossil infrastructure with clean alternatives.

I've seen it in policy rooms. The promise of future CCS is used to justify approving a new gas plant today or extending the life of a coal mine. It's a powerful tool for delay. Capital that could flood into scaling up green hydrogen, grid-scale batteries, and industrial electrification gets diverted to prolonging the incumbent system.

It also creates a perverse incentive to not improve efficiency. Why invest in radical energy efficiency if you think you can just capture the waste later? CCS can lock in inefficient processes for decades.

So, where does this leave us? Carbon capture isn't useless. It might have a niche role in tackling process emissions from cement or steel production that are hard to abate otherwise. But as a central strategy for cleaning up power generation, its negatives are too large to ignore.

The high costs, the energy penalty, the scaling challenges, the leakage risks, and the moral hazard present a formidable set of hurdles. They suggest that the vast majority of our effort and capital should go into solutions that avoid emissions in the first place, rather than building a sprawling, expensive, and risky industry to manage them after the fact.

Betting the planet on carbon capture at scale feels like choosing the most complex, expensive, and uncertain path when simpler, faster, and cheaper options are available. We should pursue those first, with relentless focus.