Carbon capture has been prominently featured in almost every major oil and gas conference over the past ten years. It can be seen in the glossy brochures placed near the entrance, in the panel discussions, and in the cautious optimism of executives who explain why fossil fuels and a livable planet are not inherently incompatible. Because science will eventually clean up the exhaust, the technology has operated as a sort of permission slip: keep drilling, burning, and operating the machinery. The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University has released a new report that makes it much more difficult to obtain that permission.
When the numbers are put together bluntly, they are hard to dispute. A route centered on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification would cost at least thirty trillion dollars over the next few decades, while a pathway to net zero by 2050 that heavily relies on carbon capture and storage would cost about one trillion dollars more annually.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) — Oxford Smith School Report
| Issuing institution | Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford; co-authored with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and Grantham Institute, Imperial College London |
| Lead authors | Dr. Rupert Way (Oxford Smith School), Dr. Andrea Bacilieri (INET Oxford), Richard Black (Grantham Institute, Imperial College London) |
| Core finding | High-CCS pathway to net zero by 2050 costs at least $30 trillion more than a low-CCS route — roughly $1 trillion extra per year |
| Global CCS investment to date | Over $40 billion invested globally; captures less than 0.1% of annual CO2 emissions |
| Cost trajectory of CCS | No cost reduction observed in 40 years — unlike solar, wind, and batteries which have fallen dramatically in price |
| Current global CCS volume | ~49 MtCO2/yr captured; low-CCS pathways require a 13-fold scale-up by 2030; high-CCS pathways require 85-fold increase |
| 70% of CCS usage | Used for enhanced oil recovery — extracting more fossil fuels — not permanent carbon storage |
| Land use impact (high-CCS) | Requires 1.3 million sq km more land than low-CCS routes — roughly half the size of Saudi Arabia — threatening food, water, and biodiversity |
| Reference / full report | Oxford Smith School — Full Report & Analysis |
The researchers, led by Dr. Rupert Way of Oxford’s Smith School and colleagues from Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are cautious to point out that this is most likely an underestimate. They contend that the actual disparity is most likely greater.
The report’s cost history is what sets it apart from conventional academic skepticism. The cost of carbon capture has hardly changed in forty years. The cost of solar panels decreased. The cost of wind turbines decreased. Even the optimists were taken aback by the sharp decline in battery storage costs. In contrast, CCS did not advance, scale, or provide the learning curve that almost all other energy technologies eventually succeeded in producing. Dr. Way writes, “Any hopes that the cost of CCS will decline in a similar way to renewable technologies like solar and batteries appear misplaced,” which reads more like an admission of something the field has been quietly sitting with for years than a polished academic conclusion.
It’s difficult to ignore the failure’s specific form. Despite the fact that more than $40 billion has been invested worldwide in CCS, less than 1% of the world’s annual CO2 emissions are captured by the technology. However, seventy percent of current CCS operations use the captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, which is essentially injecting it underground to push out more oil, rather than permanently storing carbon. At best, the transaction’s climate benefit is complex; at worst, it’s a rounding error on the wrong side of the ledger.
The history of how CCS initially entered the climate discourse is a longer tale. When the IPCC started including it in its mitigation scenarios during the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in the late 1990s, the concept gained traction. According to one analysis, the idea was “simple yet lucrative”—humans could continue burning fossil fuels while burying the emissions that resulted. In hindsight, it was precisely the kind of solution that influential industries typically support: one that calls for change to occur somewhere else, in some future technology, overseen by engineers rather than enforced by legislation. Perhaps the point is that it maintained the relevance of the current infrastructure.
The Oxford findings came at an awkward time because major oil-producing countries were expected to announce shared carbon storage goals at the COP28 summit in Dubai. The geopolitics of carbon capture and the science behind it seem to have been going in different directions for a while, with the diplomatic discourse continuously being more optimistic than the facts support. The Oxford report’s authors admit that CCS will probably be required in truly difficult-to-abate industries like cement production and some industrial retrofits, but they do not advocate for its complete abandonment. However, using it widely to replace the kind of structural energy transition that renewables could provide is, in their words, “economically illiterate.”
A layer that is frequently overlooked in the technical discussion is added by the land use question. Approximately 1.3 million square kilometers more agricultural land is needed for high-CCS pathways than for low-CCS ones because they usually require large-scale biomass energy deployment combined with carbon capture. That is roughly half the size of Saudi Arabia. The competition between that land use and biodiversity, water availability, and food production isn’t theoretical; rather, it’s the kind of downstream effect that seldom shows up in the initial cost modeling but eventually manifests in the real world.
It’s still unclear if these findings will be convincing or inconvenient to the governments that are currently incorporating CCS into their national decarbonization plans. In addition to the oil and gas industry, the technology now has a constituency in the policy infrastructure that has developed around it, including trade associations, consultancies, and the substantial amount of climate modeling that has assumed CCS at scale for so long that it has become structural. Unwinding that assumption is a political calculation, not just an economic one. Furthermore, no matter how well-sourced a working paper is, political calculations—especially ones involving this much money—tend not to proceed. However, the working papers have a tendency to pile up, and eventually the math becomes unavoidable.
