For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective.

They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.

Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.

Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.

Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.

Global leaders are betting on carbon capture working now more than ever.

The models used in the latest United Nations assessment presume the technology succeeds.

IEA representatives and U.N. modelers say their projections reflect what the world has to do to achieve its goals of averting extreme warming.

Right now, U.S. taxpayers are paying oil and gas companies $85 for every metric ton they put underground.

At that rate, by 2050, the world could be spending half a trillion dollars — more than China’s military budget, and 10 times more than the U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget — each year.

Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology, even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.

For example, the same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground.

The modeled pathways, what we call projections, for deployment of carbon capture and storage are from text and tables in the International Energy Agency’s Energy Technology Perspectives and World Energy Outlook reports, and from correspondence with the IEA. The 2008 and 2010 projections are from the IEA’s Blue Map scenario; a second 2010 projection is from the Net Zero by 2050 scenario; 2018 is from the Sustainable Development scenario; and 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 are from the Announced Pledges, Stated Policies and Net Zero by 2050 scenarios. Some of these scenarios represent pathways designed to achieve a specific temperature or concentration of CO2. Other scenarios represent what is possible based on current policies or pledges. Pathways from years where underlying data was not provided in the IEA’s report were excluded.

In response to emailed questions, a spokesperson for the IEA said, “The IEA’s long-term modelling and scenarios are not designed to predict future deployment of technologies; the different scenarios we produce are intended to explore the potential implications and trade-offs of different policy, technology and investment choices.” The agency said that solar power has succeeded in part because of successful policy support for it, especially in China, and that CCS has lagged because of a lack of similar support. It added that CCS remains a part of the solution portfolio for industries that might otherwise be hard to decarbonize. The spokesperson noted that a record number of CCS projects are under construction.

Data for the actual CCS capacity derives from the IEA’s CCUS Projects Database. We defined large-scale projects as those with the estimated capacity to store at least 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. The data comprises only projects that were completed and that permanently store CO2, rather than those that utilize CO2 for enhanced recovery of oil and gas or other uses, since those uses can create more carbon than they store or have looser requirements for monitoring.

Of the 12 completed CCS injection projects, 11 remain operational and one has been decommissioned. The annual total for carbon stored assumes the projects operated at their stated capacity each year since launch, which few have done. The comparison to the volume of CO2 emitted by a single large power plant is derived from data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The projections for solar power production are from the IEA’s World Energy Outlook reports. Data depicted is from the Announced Pledges, Current Policies, New Policies, Net Zero by 2050, Reference, Sustainable Development and Stated Policies scenarios. Data was limited to projections from IEA reports from every other year to make the chart less cluttered.

Data for the actual deployment of solar energy was taken from IEA’s World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives reports.

Data comparing projections and deployment of carbon storage and solar energy was initially compiled by researchers Rory French and Lindsey Gulden.

The 6 billion tons target figure is derived from the 2024 paper “The feasibility of reaching gigatonne scale CO2 storage by mid-century.” It reflects the median quantity of subsurface carbon storage among scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report scenario database that have a greater than 67% chance of limiting warming to 2°C.

The IPCC said it does not develop or run the models that create the scenarios in its database, and noted that the Assessment Report includes information contextualizing and questioning the models’ assumptions around solar and CCS deployment.

The estimate of 768,000 square miles of land needed to grow biomass comes from the Sixth Assessment Report’s Technical Summary, which states that the cropland area needed to keep warming below 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot is around 199 million hectares in 2050.

The estimate of 68,000 miles of pipeline is sourced from the 2021 Net-Zero America report.

To calculate how many large-scale CCS reservoirs would be required to meet the 6 billion metric tons target, we assumed the projects would bury as much as the largest carbon storage project has in its largest year, the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project in Australia, which injected 2.7 million tons in 2019. That figure came from the 2025 annual report from the London Register of Subsurface CO2 Storage, produced by Imperial College London.

To calculate the total annual cost for CCS projects by 2050, we multiplied the $85-per-ton subsidy the U.S. offers industry in its 45Q tax credit by 6 billion tons.

China’s 2025 military budget is sourced from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget for 2024 comes from the U.N. Systems Chief Executives Board for Coordination’s expenses factsheet.