ProPublica Investigation: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Cannot Solve Climate Change at Scale

A detailed investigation by ProPublica and Drilled examines the long history of overpromise and underdelivery in carbon capture and storage technology. The piece argues that CCS has never come close to the deployment levels projected by the International Energy Agency and other bodies, and that scaling it to the levels required by UN climate models would demand impossible resources: 68,000 miles of new pipelines in the US alone, a new geological storage site every four days for 25 years, and annual costs reaching half a trillion dollars by 2050. The report documents repeated failures at existing CCS sites, including clogged equipment, cracked sealing rock, and CO2 escaping through old wells. It contrasts the technology's stagnation with the rapid growth of solar power, which modelers consistently underestimated. The authors suggest that CCS has been promoted by fossil fuel interests as a way to delay the transition away from oil and gas, and that policymakers should focus on proven solutions instead.