Carbon capture is misused to delay cuts, scientists say

It was meant to cancel out past emissions. It is seen as a substitute for cutting fossil fuels.

- BY OLIVIA RUDGARD

Back in 2001, Kenneth Möllersten and Michael Obersteiner came up with a novel idea that transformed the math of carbon emissions — and the world's path to net zero.

At the time, oil and gas companies were dabbling with capturing carbon from fossil fuels, a process that cut emissions from producing energy to nearly zero. By burning plants instead, the two researchers figured, the industry could generate energy with negative emissions: Those trapped in trees or other biofuels, minus those captured from burning them.

The concept helped pave the way for the world to adopt negative emissions as a central part of climate planning — it's become a key element of official emissions-reduction plans submitted to the United Nations by major economies including the U.K., Brazil and Australia.

Ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last week, most countries that filed emissions plans with net-zero goals are relying on carbon removals to reach their target, according to analysis by the Climate Action Tracker, a partnership of climate researchers.

But Möllersten and Obersteiner are far from thrilled. The problem, they say, is that carbon capture was meant to cancel out past emissions. Instead, it's bred an overconfidence that the strategy can substitute any hard-to-make cuts to fossil fuels.

Many countries, for example, are simply planning to overshoot their goals or haven't bothered to spell out how they will reach them. Around 60 countries have updated their climate plans since the world agreed to transition away from fossil fuels at COP two years ago, but none of them included targets to cut oil and gas production. Some 20% of pledged emissions cuts, meanwhile, are unaccounted for in countries' climate plans, the Climate Action Tracker group said. The assumption, it added, is that a lot of that will be captured.