The world's operational carbon capture and storage fleet stood at 75 projects capturing 62.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year as of February 2026, according to the International Energy Agency's CCUS Projects database. That throughput equals roughly the annual greenhouse gas output of Ecuador — and covers less than 0.2% of the 38.1 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted annually from fossil-fuel use.

The material stream itself tells an uncomfortable story for anyone framing CCS as an industrial decarbonisation tool. Almost all operating projects sit at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites. Fossil-fuel processing accounts for roughly 49 Mt of the 62 Mt captured, and enhanced oil recovery — injecting CO2 into depleted wells to squeeze out more crude — absorbs around 45 Mt. Around three-quarters of all CO2 captured today is deployed to produce more oil, and much of the captured gas is a by-product of methane purification at gas projects.

The technology's provenance is written into those numbers. Carbon capture was first rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s for enhanced oil recovery. Its first appearance in the climate literature came in a 1976 academic article proposing ocean injection. A 2005 IPCC special report on the topic counted just three small-scale capture-and-storage projects at the time.

Built capacity versus the pipeline

The gap between steel in the ground and paper projects is stark. Beyond the 62.5 Mt operating, 93.7 Mt of capture or storage capacity was under construction as of February 2026, with a further 1,279.6 Mt sitting in "planning" — IEA shorthand for anything from early concept to engineering study. The sector's long record of cancellations and delays tempers what that pipeline implies.

Geography concentrates built capacity in hydrocarbon-producing jurisdictions: the US leads at 26.8 Mt, followed by Brazil at 14.2 Mt, Canada at 10 Mt and China at 7 Mt. Only seven coal-fired CCS plants operate worldwide — five in China, one in the US, one in Canada — after the 2000s push for coal CCS collapsed under falling renewable costs.

Should planned projects materialise, the sector mix shifts markedly. Steel, hydrogen and cement — where CCS is currently virtually absent — would see significant growth, with dedicated CO2 storage capacity approaching 400 Mt by 2030 in the planned category.

The net-zero mandate and the scaling arithmetic

The IPCC's sixth assessment report calls CCS a "critical mitigation option" for cement and chemicals, and the IEA describes it as "virtually the only" technology able to cut cement emissions significantly — cement accounts for around 7% of global CO2, much of it from process chemistry that electrification cannot eliminate. The IEA has stated net-zero would be "virtually impossible" without CCS.

Its net-zero scenario requires 1.7 Gt of annual capture by 2035 — nearly 30 times today's operating base. A study in Nature Communications Earth & Environment found 33 of 67 long-term net-zero strategies submitted to the UN rely on CCS, with 10 more flagging potential use, and that high-income oil and gas producers such as Canada and Norway show the "firmest commitment".

Dr Jennifer Roberts, deputy director of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre, put the modelling case plainly: "From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach."

The outlook keeps shrinking, though. Carbon Brief analysis shows the IEA has cut its projected power-sector CCS capacity by a third between its 2021 and 2025 net-zero scenarios — 2050 projections fall from roughly 400 GW to 240 GW — reflecting both slow deployment and cheap renewables. In the current IEA scenario, cement, steel and chemicals account for 60% of CO2 captured in 2050. Yet heavy industry represents less than 10% of announced capacity to date. NGOs Bellona and E3G argue in their "CCS ladder" that cement and lime should rank highest in climate value, while power-sector CCS carries "low and decreasing value".

Performance data cuts against the pitch

A 2023 University of Oxford working paper concluded a low-CCS pathway to net-zero would cost around $1 trillion less per year than a high-CCS pathway, finding "no evidence…for technological learning or associated cost reductions" in CCS to date — while conceding CCS is "still likely necessary" for cement and chemicals.

Capture rates at operating facilities compound the concern. IEEFA analyses show most projects run far below the 90% benchmark widely seen as the minimum, and below UK guidelines targeting 95%. Climate Analytics calculated in 2023 that if capture rates stay near the ~50% seen at existing facilities, a high-CCS pathway could add 86 GtCO2e by 2050, with even the IEA's scenario carrying 16 GtCO2e of "underperforming fossil CCS" risk.

IEEFA energy finance analyst Andrew Reid questioned the logic of decarbonising fossil fuels at all: "As for cement and chemicals, again, there are alternatives, but these are nascent and expensive. CCS may be a solution here and if investment is going to be made in any area, it most likely should be these."

The UK test case

The UK government has committed "up to" £21.7 billion over 25 years to its first five CCS projects, a package backed by both the Conservative and Labour governments — though three-quarters of the funding is expected to come from consumer levies, not Treasury budgets. The East Coast Cluster and HyNet are slated for deployment in the late 2020s, with Acorn in north-east Scotland and Viking in the Humber following around 2030. CO2 will be injected into offshore saline aquifers and depleted gas fields.

The Climate Change Committee's seventh carbon budget pathway assigns CCS 2% of emissions cuts in 2030 and 8% in 2050 — 15% including BECCS removals. The committee still "cannot see a route to net-zero that does not include CCS", but cut its recommended power and industry CCS capacity from 46 Mt to 41 Mt between its sixth and seventh budgets.

Friction is building around the specifics. A Public Accounts Committee report in early 2025 said the government's cluster-based approach "does not ensure that financial support for CCUS is directed at the sectors which will need it most", highlighting cement. BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen facility at Teesside at the end of 2025, with a data centre now planned for the site. Carbon Tracker analysis found the Net Zero Teesside gas-CCS plant could cut emissions by three-quarters versus unabated gas — or by only a quarter if it burns high-upstream-emission imported gas.

Enrique Cornejo, head of energy policy at Offshore Energies UK, argues the UK must "achieve economies of scale" and that "it is indeed necessary to streamline the cluster sequencing process to ensure that emitters in sectors such as cement have a clear route to the CCS market."

What happens next turns on measurable tests rather than rhetoric: whether the 93.7 Mt under construction reaches operation, whether the 1,279.6 Mt planning pipeline survives final investment decisions, and whether the UK's late-2020s cluster deadlines hold against a Treasury under pressure to redirect the £21.7 billion commitment.