Super store: the early stages of CCS deployment

As the world struggles to gain control of greenhouse gas emissions, it is slowly becoming clear that failure will be guaranteed without the large-scale use of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Last month, the G7 set the year 2100 as the target for total decarbonisation of the global energy system. Despite strong campaigns for divestment from fossil fuels, and the growth of renewable energy, it is realistic to expect that oil, gas and coal will continue to be extracted and burnt and the emissions released into  the atmosphere for the remainder of the century. This perhaps is why researchers, policy makers and even the oil bosses themselves have recently started to talk up the need for a global effort at “mitigation”.

Mitigation means CCS: trapping the CO₂ produced by power generation and other industrial processes and storing it for all time beneath the surface of the Earth in exhausted oil and gas reservoirs.

The technique of injecting liquid CO₂ has been used by the oil industry for more than 40 years to assist in extraction. But over the last 18 months, CCS has been invoked again and again for its potential role in the fight against climate change; it has even been referred to as the only means left by which humanity might limit future rises in temperature  to within 2ºC, the level beyond which governments agree the effects  of global warming would be unacceptable. Last month, Ben van Beurden, Shell chief executive, called on policy makers to support the large-scale implementation of CCS. He was echoing a view put forward by the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said in its last assessment report that, without CCS, the cost of mitigation would double, making the 2ºC boundary unaffordable.