As 2024 Comes to a Close What is the Current Capacity of Carbon Capture Projects Worldwide?

When the recent IPCC report called for carbon capture and storage (CCS) capacity to reach 900 million metric tons per year by 2030, the reality of where we are currently, makes the goal increasingly appear out of reach. CCS is a geoengineering technology designed to take the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) coming from human activities and find a place to put it or useful alternatives.

The CCS Report Card for 2024

In 2024, CCS’s global capacity reached 51 million, an increase of 2 million tons from 2023. From approval to construction CCS projects can take a half decade or more. What are the current numbers?

• 45 projects operating today with 9 new ones having come online in 2024.
• 44 projects are in various stages of construction.
• 534 are under review for approval and development.
• Based on the above numbers total CCS capacity by 2030 will hit 435 million tons, less than half the amount of required IPCC projections to keep us on track to limit atmospheric warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

As geoengineering experiments go, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and burying it underground, appears less dangerous than options that involve dumping aerosols into the stratosphere, seeding oceans, and even launching Sun shield satellites into space. The first two have been tried in limited experiments. The last one has not.

Those who see putting CO2 underground as a waste of a resource have encouraged the development of a CCS offshoot, carbon capture utilization and storage or CCUS. Captured CO2 can be useful whether being injected into depleted oil and gas wells to rejuvenate them or turning the gas into products like carbon fibre or synthetic fuels. The current state of CCUS facilities is capturing 50 Megatons of CO2 annually with 700 projects in various stages of development.

The Current State of Direct Air Capture 

At the University of California – Berkeley, advances in CO2 direct air capture (DAC) have led to the discovery of a new porous material called a covalent organic framework (COF) that efficiently removes the gas from the atmosphere. The material is inexpensive and a mere 200 grams can suck up as much CO2 in a year as a tree. As much as this material shows promise, we are probably a few years away from its large-scale deployment.

Current DAC projects number 18 with three removing more than 1,000 tons of the gas annually. Current plans include 130 DAC facilities under development, the largest capable of capturing 2 million tons of CO2 every year. For DAC to effectively help us achieve net zero by 2050, however, we will need an average of 32 new large-scale plants coming online annually between now and then.

Technology to Help the Ocean Carbon Sink 

Removing carbon from the air isn’t the only game in town. A new initiative is sucking carbon from the ocean. The rationale is to keep the ocean stable as the world’s largest natural global carbon sink. Seawater can hold 60 times more CO2 than air with almost 30% of human-generated CO2 ending up in the ocean every year. Over time, however, more CO2 than the ocean can handle will make it less efficient as a carbon sink. More CO2 in the ocean will mean seawater will become more acidic (CO2 in water produces carbonic acid) posing a threat to zooplankton, phytoplankton, crustaceans and many other creatures at the bottom of the food chain that support all marine life. Some scientists believe the ocean carbon sink could be jeopardized in time. Joint research from the University of Texas – Austin, Utah State and the University of Colorado reports that the ocean as a carbon sink will peak at the end of this century and by 2300 will be half as efficient.

Removing human-generated CO2 from seawater has inspired Singapore, to work with the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) in developing a geoengineering experiment with a new startup, Equatic, operating a small pilot project that has been successfully capturing 0.1 metric tons of CO2 daily since it began operations. Equatic-1 is its successor capable of capturing 1 metric ton daily. The captured CO2 is being injected into calcium and magnesium to create a solid material that will store the gas for a billion years.

The Equatic unit was to open this year but has not yet been commissioned. When operational in 2025 it will expand to 10 units with a capacity to remove 10 metric tons of CO2 daily. The goal is to remove 110,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. 200 scientists in September 2023, however, signed a letter questioning the potential risks to coral reefs and aquatic life that this technology could produce. The scientists requested more rigorous research and evaluation before Equatic continued to scale its Singapore operations.