A tender to scope out sites that could store as much as 10 percent of the country’s emissions in old North Sea oilfields closed comfortably oversubscribed last month. In the UK, the government has promised as much as £20 billion ($25 billion) in spending to kickstart the sector. There are signs that CCS may be about to get the last laugh, though.

Meanwhile, only a handful of demonstration CCS plants went into operation - and one of the biggest was switched off in 2021 as oil prices plummeted, since it had only been able to make money from the decidedly dirty business of driving carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to force out fresh crude. Wind and solar accounted for 39 percent of generation in Germany in the first quarter of 2023 and will hit 50 percent over the full year in Spain. In the following decade, it was renewables that boomed while CCS went bust. Solar and wind would never get above 10 percent of power supply. CCS was “the Google and Intel of the energy world,” the Atlantic magazine declared in a 2010 cover story that predicted For those who’ve followed the energy transition over the past few decades, there’s one technology that is treated as much as a punchline as a serious industry: Carbon capture and storage.Ī decade or so ago, many still thought it the best hope for decarbonising the world’s power systems.

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