By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Today, global operating nameplate capture capacity is approximately 60 million tonnes a year. If fully utilised, that would represent gross capture equivalent to roughly 14-15 hours of annual global energy and industrial emissions. Actual verified net storage is lower.” (- Martin Jagger, below)
Martin Jagger, a climate activist specializing in carbon capture & storage, recently wrote a sobering post on the progress of this technology in addressing the assumed-to-be climate crisis. This problematic approach is another example of the tears-in-the-ocean choices of climate mitigation policy.
“For twenty years,” he begins, “I have argued that CCS has an important role to play in managing emissions from industries where practical alternatives remain limited.” The progress to date has been small, and the effect on global emissions minuscule. He explains:
Today, global operating nameplate capture capacity is approximately 60 million tonnes a year. If fully utilised, that would represent gross capture equivalent to roughly 14-15 hours of annual global energy and industrial emissions. Actual verified net storage is lower…. Closing even the gap between today’s operating capacity and the announced [EIA estimated 2030 pipeline would require an extraordinary acceleration in permitting, financing, construction, commissioning and sustained operating performance.
The interest and potential investment are there, he believes, but “delivery” is small and problematic.
… announcements are not delivery, storage resources are not injection capacity, and nameplate capacity is not independently verified climate impact. The next phase of CCS must therefore be more demanding than the last. By 2030, success should no longer be measured primarily by the number of projects announced, memoranda signed, licences awarded or billions committed. It should be measured by verified net tonnes securely stored, year after year. That requires a tougher delivery model.
He alludes to the problem of getting from hyperbole to practice.
We have largely solved the problem of attracting interest and announcing investment. We have not yet solved the delivery problem. That distinction matters because CCS cannot indefinitely be judged by its potential. Nor should every delay be explained by saying that the industry simply needs more policy support or more public money. After two decades, the burden of proof must begin to shift.
Continuing:
That shift also requires greater honesty about how progress is reported. Too many of the institutions responsible for advocacy and industry leadership still present CCS largely as a good-news story. New projects, funding awards and headline capacity are publicised; delays, cancellations, operating shortfalls and the absence of verified storage receive much less attention.
Final Comment
Government incentives to carbon capture and storage, formalized in the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Section 45Q tax credit), should be terminated, an end to please many environmentalists and the free market community. [2] The whole initiative is inconsequential to global or regional climate, and projects have been opposed by local residents in the U.S. and elsewhere. [3]
[1] Martin Jagger’s bio reads:
I am an Executive Consultant in Energy Transition Strategy and Decarbonisation Delivery with a track record of bringing operator discipline to CCS policy and projects. I established Shell’s Carbon Capture and Storage Centre of Excellence in 2007 and helped shape international frameworks for long-term CO₂ storage that informed UNFCCC CDM mechanisms and regulatory guidance.
I currently advise sovereigns, regulators and innovators on areas where policy realism, technical feasibility and capital must align. My work tests the credibility of targets, the true scaling pathways for CCS and low-carbon fuels, and the structural barriers that stall momentum – especially FID drag, subsidy distortion, infrastructure mis-sequencing and the policy-performance gap.
[2] The tax credits since 2022 are $85 per ton of CO₂ stored for dedicated geologic storage projects and $60 per ton for CO₂ utilization projects with associated storage, increased from $50 and $35 subsidies (2018) and $20 and $10 (2008). A summary of federal largess from Taxpayers for Common Sense reads:
For decades, the federal government has provided billions of dollars in both direct and indirect subsidies to support CCS technology and projects. These subsidies have included research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) funding, loan guarantees, and tax credits.
Over the past few decades some of these subsidies have gone to projects that have been repeatedly started and stopped, only to eventually collapse due to various economic issues and controversies (e.g., FutureGen, Kemper). Additionally, the 45Q tax credit, which has grown significantly in both size and scope, has been mired in fraud and waste. To date, the federal government has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on CCS through research and development funding and tax credits, yet the technology is still struggling with widescale deployment issues due to high costs….
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress provided roughly $9 billion (in nominal dollars) in annual appropriations for DOE’s FECM from FY2010 to FY2023, with over $2.8 billion specifically directed towards CCS line items…. Congress appropriated $12 billion more to the technology through the infrastructure law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, P.L. 117-58) and greatly expanded the already lucrative tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act (Public Law 117-169).
[3] There are currently 15 operating CCS facilities in the U.S. and another 120 projects under development. The top ten projects are (verbatim):
1. Stratos Direct Air Capture (DAC) Project
Companies: Occidental Petroleum (through its subsidiary 1 Point Five) and Origis Energy
Capacity: 500, 000 metric tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Direct Air Capture powered by a dedicated solar portfolio
Source: Origis Energy Commissions 500 MWdc Swift Air Solar Projects in …
2. Calpine Baytown Energy Center CCS Project
Companies: Calpine Corporation and Exxon Mobil
Capacity: Approximately 2 million metric tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Low-carbon power generation from a new natural gas plant
Source: Calpine, Exxon Mobil sign CO 2 transportation and storage …
3. CF Industries Donaldsonville CCS Facility
Companies: CF Industries and Exxon Mobil
Capacity: A key component of Exxon Mobil’s contracted ~9 million metric tons per annum (MTA) portfolio
Application: Decarbonization of ammonia production
Source: Here’s How XOM Is Scaling Up Its CCS Footprint to Reduce Emissions
4. Google-Backed Gas Power Plant with CCS
Companies: Google and Mitsubishi Power
Capacity: Designed to capture 90% of CO₂ emissions
Application: Firm, low-carbon power for data centers
Source: Google Commits to First U.S. Gas-Fired Power Plant with Integrated …
5. California Resources Corporation (CRC) Carbon Terra Vault I (CTV I)
Company: California Resources Corporation
Capacity: Not specified; designed as a dedicated CO₂ storage facility
Application: CO₂ injection and permanent geologic storage
Source: California Resources Corporation Breaks Ground on California’s …
6. Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub (SCS Hub)
Companies: Frontier Infrastructure and Baker Hughes
Capacity: Positioned to be one of the largest U.S. CO₂ sequestration assets (specific tonnage not provided)
Application: Multi-user CO₂ sequestration hub for industrial emitters
Source: Baker Hughes, Frontier Infrastructure Partner on Carbon Capture …
7. ADM Decatur CCS Facility
Company: Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM)
Capacity: Averages nearly 0.5 Mtpa (based on 4.5 million metric tons sequestered over a decade)
Application: Long-term industrial CCS for ethanol production
Source: ADM and Carbon Capture and Storage
8. Lake Charles Power Station Integrated CO₂ Capture Project
Company: Project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
Capacity: Not specified; large-scale pilot
Application: Advancing capture technologies for power generation
Source: [XLS] Sheet 1 – Climate Program Portal
9. Illinois CO₂ Injection Project
Company: Unnamed Texas-based developer
Capacity: Not specified; early-stage regulatory filing
Application: New CO₂ injection and storage project
Source: CP Daily Newsletter: Wednesday February 18, 2026 – Carbon Pulse
10. Bantam DAC Facility
Company: Climeworks
Capacity: Over 5, 000 tons of CO₂ annually
Application: Direct Air Capture, noted as the largest operational DAC in the U.S. as of October 2025
Source: Facilities – CO 2 RE – Global CCS Institute
By far, the best CCS device is Trees!
If you want to capture carbon grow trees. If you want to store it then do this…
Poplar Trees mature in 10 years. At maturity they weigh about 350lbs, 50% of which is Carbon.
12 trees equal One Ton of carbon.
.
Poplar grows relatively straight making it easy to stack. Upward of 6,000 trees can be grown per acre of land. 2 acres is 12,000 trees or 1,000 tons of Carbon (100 tons per year for 10 years).
Plant thousands of acres of Poplar Trees, harvest them every 10 years, stack them in old tailed out open pit mines, cover with water to maintain anoxic/abiotic conditions to prevent decomposition. When the pit is full then recover with earth and restore the land to its original pre mine condition.
This gives the added benefit of creating more FF Coal in a few million years.
.
This effectively sinks millions of tons of carbon…how quickly depends on the number of acres of land devoted to trees and the availability of tailed out pit mines.
Plant trees for lumber .
Build houses . Much better .
Bingo! Bigly!
With the exception that Houses can Burn.
The vast majority of wooden houses never burn.
More importantly, intentionally reducing levels of beneficial atmospheric carbon dioxide, to no other end, is a fool’s errand.
Houses also don’t last thousands of years while tree trunks buried below ground last millions until they undergo metamorphosis
I didn’t say that atmospheric CO2 was a bad thing, I said…
“If you want to capture carbon”
And store it away economically…
So can brick built churches. What’s your point?
Shutting down coal or gas fired dispatchable power which releases that same 60 million tonnes of CO2 presents exactly the same story, but in contrast to CCUS does provide convenience and prosperity. Pointing it out as I do every chance I get has no apparent effect.
Talk about spitting into the ocean. Most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from oceanic outgassing and soil respiration as a consequence of warming. What a complete waste of time, and they’re merely engaged in an exercise in futility that deprives plants of their source of sustenance.
Then, they’ll have us all wearing a special face mask to capture our personal CO2 emission.
If only you were joking. Methane-capturing masks are already being put on cattle, this can’t be far behind.
I designed one of those a few years ago. Called it the Foul Air Recover Trapping System or FARTS. Has 2 inputs for capturing gas – one for CO2 and one for CH4. The risk is if they get crossed and the rear one overcomes the top one and becomes your breathing tube. Still trying to figure that out..
Allen Pettee wrote, “Most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from oceanic outgassing and soil respiration as a consequence of warming.”
That’s incorrect, Allen. The ONLY reason that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising is that humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than nature is removing it.
If we weren’t adding CO2 to the atmosphere, the level would be falling, rather than raising.
● Mankind is adding about 5 ppmv of fossil CO2 to the atmosphere each year (and perhaps a little bit of non-fossil CO2 through “land-use changes” — the GCB 2025 estimates that at +0.6 ppmv/year, but that’s really just a guess).
● Nature is removing an average of about 2.4 ppmv of CO2 from the atmosphere each year (or a bit more if you think mankind is adding non-fossil CO2 through “land-use changes”).
● The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing because we’re adding CO2 faster than nature is removing it. It is currently increasing at an average rate of about 2.6 ppmv per year.
Some people think that the ongoing CO2 rise is a result of global warming, rather than caused by human emissions of CO2. They are wrong: the data show that net natural CO2 fluxes are negative, which is to say, nature is removing CO2 from the air, not adding it.
Additionally, the CO2 level is currently rising at a rate of about 2.6 ppmv/year, which is more than an order of magnitude faster than any past natural CO2 increases recorded in ice core data. We know from ice core data that during pre-industrial warming and cooling periods, e.g., from RWP to DACP to MWP to LIA, and also over glaciation cycles, CO2 levels changed at rates measured in just hundredths of a ppmv per year.
That’s two proofs that the current CO2 level increase is not caused by warming. For a deep dive into the topic, with examination of several different lines of evidence, see:
Engelbeen F. et al (2024). “The Human Contribution to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: How Human Emissions Are Restoring Vital Atmospheric CO2.” CO2 Coalition. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/het6n
Most of the confused people who think warming is causing the CO2 level rise make the mistake of confusing the “turnover time” (a/k/a “residence time”) of CO2 in the atmosphere with the “adjustment time.”
The adjustment time can be thought of as the duration of the effect on atmospheric CO2 levels of an addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. It is about 55 ±10 years.
The turnover time is the average time that a carbon atom remains in the atmosphere (3–5 years), before one of three things happens to it:
1. It is temporarily removed, e.g. by being absorbed in water, and then released back into the air, e.g. when the water evaporates; or,
2. It is exchanged for another carbon atom, through bidirectional fluxes between the air and other “carbon reservoirs;” or,
3. It is removed and sequestered for the long term elsewhere, mostly in oceans, biosphere and soils.
Only the 3rd of those mechanisms changes the AMOUNT of CO2 in the air, and so only the 3rd affects the adjustment time.
The 2nd and 3rd mechanisms both affect the isotopic composition of the atmosphere, so they both contribute to the observed 20-year 14C radiocarbon “bomb spike” decay time constant.
All three mechanisms contribute to the very short average turnover time (“residence time”), which is generally reported to be 4 ±1 years.
If someone doesn’t understand that the adjustment time is not the same thing as the residence time, then he can mistakenly conclude that the effect of our 5 ppmv/yr anthropogenic emissions is just 5 × 4 = 20 ppmv, or 13% of the observed increase.
That’s wrong, because (1) merely temporary removals of CO2 from the air do not change the amount of CO2 in the air, and because (2) exchanges of carbon in CO2 in the air for equal amounts of from other reservoirs also do not change the amount of CO2 in the air.
The good news is that, contrary to the climate industry’s FUD-based marketing campaign, those rising CO2 levels are beneficial, not harmful. Here are some papers:
https://sealevel.info/negative_social_cost_of_carbon.html
Rising CO2 levels are greening the Earth, so much so that NASA can measure the welcome trend from satellites, in space. Here’s a NASA article about one of the studies:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/
This is a NASA video about it:
The ONLY reason…
Wrong.
I’m sorry Dave I can’t let you do that.
So, before the industrial revolution when we started burning fossil fuels in large quantities, Nature was removing CO2 at 2.4 ppmv.
It’s a good job we found fossil fuels or Nature would have removed all of the CO2 by now and all life would be gone.
So if we remove all of Dave’s unverifiable assumptions and stick to reliable data, what do we actually know? Are any of these claims wrong:
1) CO2 levels in 1850 aren’t knowable all that precisely, and there is a lot of spatial and temporal variation in those levels, so while Dave’s estimate was 285 ppmv, there has to be at least a +/- 50 ppmv error bar on that
2) Mauna Loa has the most reliable way to measure stratospheric CO2 due to the volcanic updraft and downdraft topology
3) ML’s measurements show an increase of about 100 ppmv over 60 years, or a bit over 1.5 ppmv p.a. (accelerating slightly)
4) The planet has also been warming up since the LIA, probably by a degree or two, resulting in oceanic outgassing (none of this is definitively attributable to human CO2 emissions of course)
5) Some of that carefully measured 1.5 ppmv p.a. is likely from human emissions and some is from the oceans? But we don’t know how much of either?
Did I miss anything?
“The ONLY reason that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising is that humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than nature is removing it.”
And the critical flaw in that statement/reasoning is that it includes inherent assumptions:
a) all natural forces removing CO2 have been identified
b) the rate of CO2 removal by each of the various natural forces is known to a high degree of certainty, and
c) that the rate of removal by natural forces is a constant
The fact that the historical/geological records proves that CO2 levels have fluctuated over the eons proves that assumption C) is wrong. It is also possible that both assumptions a) and b) are wrong too.
“60 million tonnes”
So, what do you do with that 60 million tons? Sell it on Ebay? 🙂
(With apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford 😉)
Nice. One of the best songs ever!
My father – a mining engineer – used to sing the song often . . . off duty and in his cups, of course. And I’m also a mining engineer – my father tried to talk me out of it!! – and now . . . I miss hearing that rather splendid jingle.
I suspect the Chinese have their version that is now being delivered with a full-throated roar . . . their coal production capacity and reserve indicating they are doing nothing other than preparing for war . . . that the West will not be able to counter.
Why do I say that?
Well . . . think about de-industrialisation.
We educate the best Chinese students- and we move industrial jobs there- so China must presume we have a national death wish.
Sell it to the greenhouse guys and the soda pop companies.
Carbon Capture and Storage is just a costly and energy expensive attempt to throw away irrelevantly small amounts of useful plant food. It is promoted by people who have conveniently forgotten the elementary biology they should have learnt in primary school.
And more CO2 in the atmosphere from now on can only have a minor and diminishing temperature effect on the planet.
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/proportions-of-the-temperature-contributions-of-greenhouse-gasses-h2o-co2-n2o-ch4/
OK, if you limit achievements to how much of that wicked CO2 is sequestered, and how much of the planet is saved from destruction in the imminent global conflagration, yeah, it’s a waste. But the authors of most of this modern-day Jabberwocky have a different perspective.
However, I think you missed the real objective. There are the campaign donations to Congressmen (for those offended by general terms, I won’t use “Congresspersons”) & Senators, the lobbyists who conduct the funds to the willing recipients, the lawyers who concoct the legalese needed to obfuscate the objectives while achieving the desired legislation, the companies who provide the investments (i.e., bribes) which generate multifold returns (i.e., contracts & grants), and the advertisements in journals, papers and even TV, Oh, and don’t forget the occasional facility that gets into construction in spite of all the work to avoid actually doing something. How can you call the money that creates all those jobs generated during this cycle “wasted?”
“For twenty years,” he begins, “I have argued that CCS …
About 20 years ago a person asked me to review several research proposals by students that had been submitted to his small foundation. A couple of those involved Carbon Capture. I responded that I would not suggest supporting these because the students did not grasp the concept of scale.
The only thing that is different from 20 years ago is the scale of the wasted money.
But the people in whose pockets that money has ended up in have done nicely out of it. Somebody, somewhere, always profits from such waste.
What a fraudster and scam artist or, possibly, completely ignorant of basic physics! Atmospheric CO2 is miniscule compared to the amount solved in the cold waters of the deep oceans. CO2 has a negligent effect on our climate. The atmosphere is an open system and so are the oceons. Henry, the British physist estabvlished already back in the 19th century that the gas pressures of the atmosphere and the oceons tend to equalize, to mention a few of your scamful propositions.
What can one say but : DUH
I guess you can be too Stupid to be accused of corruption .
If you are going to capture CO2 for whatever reason it is obviously literally a thousand times more efficient to do it directly from the stack .
At the Mauna Loa Obs. in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently 427 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has mass of 1,290 g and contains a mere 0.84 grams of CO2. The reason there is this trace amount of CO2 in the air is that Mother Nature has perfected CCS systems. These are: plants on land, plants in the oceans and in the fresh waters, and the oceans and fresh waters.
The pH of the ocean is 8.1. When CO2 is absorbed by the ocean, the large portion of CO2 is converted to mostly to bicarbonate anion and to a smaller amount carbonate anion. These anions are used by the. animals to form their shells. The rigid structures of corals are calcium carbonate.
The cocolithophores and foraminifera outer envelopes are calcium carbonate. When these organism die, they sink to the ocean floor. After millions of years thick deposits of limestone are formed. The large formations of limestone on land were once under water.
The chemical engineers are quite aware of the above but are constructing these CCS system to capture and store the easy money from the lavish government subsidies
A CC and fuel synthesis plant was planned for Merritt BC and was supposed to be running by 2025. It received a few million in government grants and the plan was to capture CO2, generate green hydrogen, and make fuel. The proposed power requirement was 315MW. At the same time, Site C dam was under construction and I recall calculating the plant would suck up 1/3 to 1/2 of the capacity of Site C which cost $16 B in the end. Add that to the cost of carbon capture to fuel… measured in the hundred thousands of gallons. Not likely a good deal, and it was never started.
In the name of everything that lives and breathes on God’s green Earth, I demand that all the CO2 that has been sequestered be immediately released. Locking up plant food is a crime against the biosphere and is the complete antithesis of every idea of stewardship and conservationism. You would have to be demented to do it.
Humans exhale 8 million metric tons of CO2 everyday for use by the plants.
Just think of all the useful things that could have been done with that money, access to clean water, waste treatment, updating bridges, make traffic flow smoother, improve road systems and on and on. These things would actually make a difference in everyone’s daily life.
Completely delusional. They could have saved a lot of time by simply chucking the billions of dollars into the sea….
Don Quixote would have felt he was in a target rich zone with all this ineffectual nonsense.
Post of the week award!
It is simple.
If CCS was a viable process, industry would be using it widely and routinely.
Stop wasting taxpayer money with government grants and other incentives. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to drink, but you can’t make it water”. Geoff S
Subject: Occidental Petroleum’s CO2 Reduction Plan
In the April 11, 2023 edition of the Wall Street Journal, an article by Benoit Morenne described a plan by Occidental Petroleum to extract massive amounts of CO2 out of the air. Occidental is spending more than $1 billion to build the first of a planned fleet of plants. The plant will remove 500,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air per year. Occidental intends to build up to 135 more of these plants by the year 2035. Occidental claims that its initial cost to remove a metric tonn of CO2 would be between $400 and $500. Using $400 a metric ton, the total cost by 2035 would be $2,400,000,000, excluding possible cost reductions due to efficiencies of scale, for removing 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Tax incentives will subsidize 45% of the initial costs, thanks to Bidens’ climate package that was signed into law last year.
Consider how this plan will cut global CO2 levels from now to the year 2035. Assume that all 135 plants are on line and operating today. By 2035, these plants will have removed 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2. The atmosphere weighs 5,500,000,000,000,000 (5.5 quadrillion) metric tons. 810,000,000 metric tons of removed CO2 is 0.0000147% of the atmosphere. CO2 currently constitutes about 0.04 % of the atmosphere. Removing 0.0000147 % of CO2 would reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 0.03999%, which when rounded to two decimal places yields 0.04%. Ergo, there will be no significant percentage reduction in CO2 levels.
Occidental expects to generate between $400 and $630 in revenue per metric ton, which includes a $180 per metric ton tax credit. So, even without the tax credits, Occidental expects to earn between $220 and $450 a metric ton. It should be noted that cost estimates for untested new technologies tend to escalate. Occidental’s projections of costs and potential revenues may be a bit too rosy in my opinion. Time will tell.
At 2.4 billion dollars, Occidental’s project may or may not be a technical or financial success. But the anticipated removal of 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2035 from the atmosphere will not measurably change the global percentage of atmospheric CO2.
Also, there is simply too much atmospheric CO2 being generated every year to extract it.
The atmosphere weighs 5,500,000,000,000,000 metric tons. 0.043% of this is CO2 which is 2,392,500,000,000 metric tons, which increases by 2% every year. Annual CO2 increases are then 47,850,000,000 metric tons a year, which will have to be extracted from the atmosphere just to keep CO2 levels from rising.
Additionally, rising CO2 levels are NOT the cause of climate change. Read papers by Dr. Will Happer, Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr. Howard Hayden, and Dr. John Cristy.