Carbon capture technology is too expensive to have a meaningful impact on climate change

What's this about?

People disagree about whether carbon capture costs too much to help slow climate change. This tool traps carbon dioxide before it warms the air.

What supporters say

• Carbon capture needs many costly parts, such as traps, power, pipes, safe storage, and checks.
• Problems with money, pipes, or project plans can raise costs and cause long delays.
• Many planned projects have not yet shown real cuts in carbon at a large enough size.
• Adding carbon capture to coal plants often uses lots of power and can cost more than clean power.

What critics say

• High cost does not mean carbon capture cannot help in every case.
• Some jobs, such as making cement or steel, create carbon that is hard to avoid.
• Carbon capture may play a small but key role for these hard-to-clean jobs.
• New rules, shared pipe networks, and strong project teams could help more projects work.

The bottom line

Carbon capture costs a lot and cannot quickly solve climate change on its own. But it may still help in a limited way, mainly for the hardest sources of carbon.

Carbon capture technology is expensive and difficult to build at scale. But the evidence does not show it is too expensive to matter at all in the fight against climate change; rather, it suggests a limited but potentially important role in industries where emissions are hardest to avoid.

The case for

The strongest argument for the claim is that carbon capture is not one simple machine. A working project needs equipment to separate carbon dioxide, extra energy to run it, pipelines or other transport, secure underground storage, monitoring, financing and effective management. Problems in any of these areas can raise costs or delay projects. Government and institutional reviews have documented financing, infrastructure and coordination problems, as well as delays and cancellations in US demonstration programs. These obstacles make rapid, economy-wide deployment unlikely 1.

Existing projects and a growing list of proposed facilities do not yet prove that carbon capture can operate at the scale needed for major climate benefits. Much of the announced capacity remains at the proposal or construction stage. Moving beyond that will require supportive policies, networks for transporting and storing carbon dioxide, and companies able to coordinate complex projects (see Figure 1). A pipeline of projects is not the same as verified emissions cuts at climate-relevant scale 4.

The case is particularly weak for fitting carbon capture to fossil-fuel power plants. Coal-plant capture projects have often suffered from high energy use, uneven performance and financial trouble. When renewable power or other cleaner electricity can replace fossil generation directly, retrofitting an old plant with capture can look comparatively unattractive. In these cases, carbon capture may cost more while delivering less certain results than cleaner alternatives 2.

Direct air capture, which removes carbon dioxide from the open air, faces even steeper hurdles. Carbon dioxide is far more spread out in the atmosphere than in industrial exhaust, so extracting it requires substantial energy and specialized machinery. Its real climate benefit also depends on where the energy comes from, how the carbon dioxide is transported and stored, and whether that storage lasts. A tonne of carbon dioxide captured is not automatically a tonne permanently removed from the climate 3.

The case against

The claim becomes much less convincing when carbon capture is considered for specific uses rather than as a universal solution. Major climate assessments include carbon capture and storage in pathways to net-zero emissions, especially for residual emissions and industries that are difficult to clean up by other means 6. The technology is generally presented as part of a wider package of measures, not as a replacement for cutting emissions directly.

Cement is a leading example. Making cement releases carbon dioxide not only from fuel use but also from the chemical process of heating limestone. Renewable electricity alone cannot eliminate those process emissions. The IPCC and International Energy Agency identify carbon capture as one option for cement and other industrial activities, alongside efficiency improvements and other low-carbon technologies 5.

Costs also vary widely from project to project. They depend on the capture rate, the type of plant, energy prices, financing and the boundaries used in cost estimates. Research and government programs aim to bring costs down, while standardized designs and shared pipelines and storage sites could improve the economics of selected projects. Those savings remain uncertain, however, and should not be treated as already achieved across the industry 7.

Deployment is expanding despite today’s barriers, with operating projects and a growing development pipeline. But announced facilities alone cannot settle the question. Their climate value will depend on whether they secure finance and infrastructure, operate as promised, and deliver durable, independently verified net emissions reductions rather than simply capturing gas at the plant gate 8.

The bottom line

The evidence does not support the absolute claim that carbon capture is too expensive to have a meaningful impact on climate change. It strongly supports a narrower conclusion: high costs, energy demands and practical barriers make broad reliance on the technology implausible, particularly for many fossil-power retrofits where cleaner alternatives are available.

Yet carbon capture could still make a meaningful targeted contribution in cement, other hard-to-abate industries, low-carbon hydrogen, and some forms of carbon removal. Its value must be judged project by project, on a full life-cycle basis that includes energy use, upstream emissions, transport and the permanence of storage. Confidence in this conditional conclusion is high, though a central uncertainty remains: whether future projects can prove durable climate benefits at sufficient scale and cost.