Original article by republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin listens as President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC on August 26, 2025. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“Administrator Zeldin is removing all incentives for big polluters to follow the law and turning a blind eye to those who suffer from the impacts of pollution.”
The Trump administration settled just 15 of the illegal pollution cases referred by the US Environmental Protection Agency in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, according to data compiled by a government watchdog—the latest evidence that Trump officials are placing corporate profits above the EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment.”
“Under [EPA Administrator] Lee Zeldin, anti-pollution enforcement is dying a quick death,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of PEER and a former enforcement attorney at EPA.
The DOJ lodged just one environmental consent decree in a case regarding a statutory violation of the Clean Air Act from the day Trump was inaugurated just over a year ago until now—signaling that the agency “virtually stopped enforcing” the landmark law that regulates air pollution.
“Enforcing the Clean Air Act means going after violators within the oil, gas, petrochemical, coal, and motor vehicle industries that account for most air pollution,” reads the report. “But these White House favorites will be shielded from any serious enforcement, at least, while Lee Zeldin remains EPA’s administrator.”
“For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”
In the first year of his first term, Trump’s DOJ settled 26 Clean Air Act cases, even more than the 22 the department prosecuted in Biden’s first year.
The report warns that plummeting enforcement actions are likely to contribute to health harms in vulnerable communities located near waterways that are filled with “algae blooms, bacteria, or toxic chemicals” and near energy and chemical industry infrastructure, where people are more likely to suffer asthma attacks and heart disease caused by smog and soot.
“Enforcing environmental laws ensures that polluters are held accountable and prevented from dumping their pollution on others for profit,” said Joanna Citron Day, general counsel for PEER and a former senior counsel at DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section. “For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”
EPA’s own enforcement and compliance database identifies 2,374 major air pollution sources that have not had a full compliance evaluation in at least five years, and shows that no enforcement action has been taken at more than 400 sources that are marked as a “high priority.”
Nearly 900 pollution sources reported to the EPA that they exceeded their wastewater discharge limits at least 50 times in the past two years.
The agency has also repealed its rules limiting carbon pollution from gas-powered cars, arguing that the EPA lacks the authority to regulate carbon.
As public health risks mount, PEER noted, Zeldin is moving forward with plans to stop calculating the health benefits of rules aimed at reducing air pollution, and issued a memo last month detailing a “compliance first” policy emphasizing a “cooperative, industry-friendly approach” to environmental regulation.
“Administrator Zeldin is removing all incentives for big polluters to follow the law,” said Whitehouse, “and turning a blind eye to those who suffer from the impacts of pollution.”
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The world’s fossil-fuel use is still on track to peak before 2030, despite a surge in political support for coal, oil and gas, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2025, published during the opening days of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, shows coal at or close to a peak, with oil set to follow around 2030 and gas by 2035, based on the stated policy intentions of the world’s governments.
Under the same assumptions, the IEA says that clean-energy use will surge, as nuclear power rises 39% by 2035, solar by 344% and wind by 178%.
Still, the outlook has some notable shifts since last year, with coal use revised up by around 6% in the near term, oil seeing a shallower post-peak decline and gas plateauing at higher levels.
This means that the IEA expects global warming to reach 2.5C this century if “stated policies” are implemented as planned, up marginally from 2.4C in last year’s outlook.
In addition, after pressure from the Trump administration in the US, the IEA has resurrected its “current policies scenario”, which – effectively – assumes that governments around the world abandon their stated intentions and only policies already set in legislation are continued.
If this were to happen, the IEA warns, global warming would reach 2.9C by 2100, as oil and gas demand would continue to rise and the decline in coal use would proceed at a slower rate.
This year’s outlook also includes a pathway that limits warming to 1.5C in 2100, but says that this would only be possible after a period of “overshoot”, where temperature rise peaks at 1.65C.
The IEA will publish its “announced pledges scenario” at a later date, to illustrate the impact of new national climate pledges being implemented on time and in full.
The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is published every autumn. It is regarded as one of the most influential annual contributions to the understanding of energy and emissions trends.
The outlook explores a range of scenarios, representing different possible futures for the global energy system. These are developed using the IEA’s “global energy and climate model”.
The latest report stresses that “none of [these scenarios] should be regarded as a forecast”.
However, this year’s outlook marks a major shift in emphasis between the scenarios – and it reintroduces a pathway where oil and gas demand continues to rise for many decades.
This pathway is named the “current policies scenario” (CPS), which assumes that governments abandon their planned policies, leaving only those that are already set in legislation.
If the world followed this path, then global temperatures would reach 2.9C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and would be “set to keep rising from there”, the IEA says.
The CPS was part of the annual outlook until 2020, when the IEA said that it was “difficult to imagine” such a pathway “prevailing in today’s circumstances”.
It has been resurrected following heavy pressure from the US, which is a major funder of the IEA that accounts for 14% of the agency’s budget.
For example, in July Politico reported “a ratcheted-up US pressure campaign” and “months of public frustrations with the IEA from top Trump administration officials”. It noted:
“Some Republicans say the IEA has discouraged investment in fossil fuels by publishing analyses that show near-term peaks in global demand for oil and gas.”
The CPS is the first scenario to be discussed in detail in the report, appearing in chapter three. The CPS similarly appears first in Annex A, the data tables for the report.
The second scenario is the “stated policies scenario” (STEPS), featured in chapter four of this year’s outlook. Here, the outlook also includes policies that governments say they intend to bring forward and that the IEA judges as likely to be implemented in practice.
In this world, global warming would reach 2.5C by 2100 – up marginally from the 2.4C expected in the 2024 edition of the outlook.
Beyond the STEPS and the CPS, the outlook includes two further scenarios.
One is the “net-zero emissions by 2050” (NZE) scenario, which illustrates how the world’s energy system would need to change in order to limit warming in 2100 to 1.5C.
The NZE was first floated in the 2020 edition of the report and was then formally featured in 2021.
The report notes that, unlike in previous editions, this scenario would see warming peak at more than 1.6C above pre-industrial temperatures, before returning to 1.5C by the end of the century.
This means it would include a high level of temporary “overshoot” of the 1.5C target. The IEA explains that this results from the “reality of persistently high emissions in recent years”. It adds:
“In addition to very rapid progress with the transformation of the energy sector, bringing the temperature rise back down below 1.5C by 2100 also requires widespread deployment of CO2 removal technologies that are currently unproven at large scale.”
Finally, the outlook includes a new scenario where everyone in the world is able to gain access to electricity by 2035 and to clean cooking by 2040, named “ACCESS”.
While the STEPS appears second in the running order of the report, it is mentioned slightly more frequently than the CPS, as shown in the figure below. The CPS is a close second, however, whereas the IEA’s 1.5C pathway (NZE) receives a declining level of attention.
Number of mentions of each scenario per 100 pages of text. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.
US critics of the IEA have presented its stated policies scenario as “disconnected from reality”, in contrast to what they describe as the “likely scenario” of “business as usual”.
Yet the current policies scenario is far from a “business-as-usual” pathway. The IEA says this explicitly in an article published ahead of the outlook:
“The CPS might seem like a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario, but this terminology can be misleading in an energy system where new technologies are already being deployed at scale, underpinned by robust economics and mature, existing policy frameworks. In these areas, ‘business as usual’ would imply continuing the current process of change and, in some cases, accelerating it.”
In order to create the current policies scenario, where oil and gas use continues to surge into the future, the IEA therefore has to make more pessimistic assumptions about barriers to the uptake of new technologies and about the willingness of governments to row back on their plans. It says:
“The CPS…builds on a narrow reading of today’s policy settings…assuming no change, even where governments have indicated their intention to do so.”
This is not a scenario of “business as usual”. Instead, it is a scenario where countries around the world follow US president Donald Trump in dismantling their plans to shift away from fossil fuels.
More specifically, the current policies scenario assumes that countries around the world renege on their policy commitments and fail to honour their climate pledges.
For example, it assumes that Japan and South Korea fail to implement their latest national electricity plans, that China fails to continue its power-market reforms and abandons its provincial targets for clean power, that EU countries fail to meet their coal phase-out pledges and that US states such as California fail to extend their clean-energy targets.
Similarly, it assumes that Brazil, Turkey and India fail to implement their greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (ETS) as planned and that China fails to expand its ETS to other industries.
The scenario also assumes that the EU, China, India, Australia, Japan and many others fail to extend or continue strengthening regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances, as well as those relating to the fuel-economy standards for new vehicles.
In contrast to the portrayal of the stated policies scenario as blindly assuming that all pledges will be met, the IEA notes that it does not give a free pass to aspirational targets. It says:
“[T]argets are not automatically assumed to be met; the prospects and timing for their realisation are subject to an assessment of relevant market, infrastructure and financial constraints…[L]ike the CPS, the STEPS does not assume that aspirational goals, such as those included in the Paris Agreement, are achieved.”
Only in the “announced pledges scenario” (APS) does the IEA assume that countries meet all of their climate pledges on time and full – regardless of how credible they are.
The APS does not appear in this year’s report, presumably because many countries missed the deadlines to publish new climate pledges ahead of COP30.
The IEA says it will publish its APS, assessing the impact of the new pledges, “once there is a more complete picture of these commitments”.
Fossil-fuel peak
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the IEA’s outlook for fossil fuels under the stated policies scenario, which it has described as “a mirror to the plans of today’s policymakers”.
In 2020, the agency said that prevailing policy conditions pointed towards a “structural” decline in global coal demand, but that it was too soon to declare a peak in oil or gas demand.
By 2021, it said global fossil-fuel use could peak as soon as 2025, but only if all countries got on track to meet their climate goals. Under stated policies, it expected fossil-fuel use to hit a plateau from the late 2020s onwards, declining only marginally by 2050.
There was a dramatic change in 2022, when it said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting global energy crisis had “turbo-charged” the shift away from fossil fuels.
As a result, it said at the time that it expected a peak in demand for each of the fossil fuels. Coal “within a few years”, oil “in the mid-2030s” and gas ”by the end of the decade”.
This outlook sharpened further in 2023 and, by 2024, it was saying that each of the fossil fuels would see a peak in global demand before 2030.
This year’s report notes that “some formal country-level [climate] commitments have waned”, pointing to the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement.
The report says the “new direction” in the US is among “major new policies” in 48 countries. The other changes it lists include Brazil’s “energy transition acceleration programme”, Japan’s new plan for 2040 and the EU’s recently adopted 2040 climate target.
Overall, the IEA data still points to peaks in demand for coal, oil and gas under the stated policies scenario, as shown in the figure below.
Alongside this there is a surge in clean technologies, with renewables overtaking oil to become the world’s largest source of energy – not just electricity – by the early 2040s.
In this year’s outlook under stated policies, the IEA sees global coal demand as already being at – or very close to – a definitive peak, as the chart above shows.
Coal then enters a structural decline, where demand for the fuel is displaced by cheaper alternatives, particularly renewable sources of electricity.
The IEA reiterates that the cost of solar, wind and batteries has respectively fallen by 90%, 70% and 90% since 2010, with further declines of 10-40% expected by 2035.
(The report notes that household energy spending would be lower under the more ambitious NZE scenario than under stated policies, despite the need for greater investment.)
However, this year’s outlook has coal use in 2030 coming in some 6% higher than expected last year, although it ultimately declines to similar levels by 2050.
For oil, the agency’s data still points to a peak in demand this decade, as electric vehicles (EVs) and more efficient combustion engines erode the need for the fuel in road transport.
While this sees oil demand in 2030 reaching similar levels to what the IEA expected last year, the post-peak decline is slightly less marked in the latest outlook, ending some 5% higher in 2050.
The biggest shift compared with last year is for gas, where the IEA suggests that global demand will keep rising until 2035, rather than peaking by 2030.
Still, the outlook has gas demand in 2030 being only 7% higher than expected last year. It notes:
“Long-term natural gas demand growth is kept lower than in recent decades by the expanding deployment of renewables, efficiency gains and electrification of end-uses.”
In terms of clean energy, the outlook sees nuclear power output growing to 39% above 2024 levels by 2035 and doubling by 2050. Solar grows nearly four-fold by 2035 and nearly nine-fold by 2050, while wind power nearly triples and quadruples over the same periods.
Notably, the IEA sees strong growth of clean-energy technologies, even in the current policies scenario. Here, renewables would still become the world’s largest energy source before 2050.
This is despite the severe headwinds assumed in this scenario, including EVs never increasing from their current low share of sales in India or the US.
The CPS would see oil and gas use continuing to rise, with demand for oil reaching 11% above current levels by 2050 and gas climbing 31%, even as renewables nearly triple.
This means that coal use would still decline, falling to a fifth below current levels by 2050.
Finally, while the IEA considers the prospect of global coal demand continuing to rise rather than falling as expected, it gives this idea short shrift. It explains:
“A growth story for coal over the coming decades cannot entirely be ruled out but it would fly in the face of two crucial structural trends witnessed in recent years: the rise of renewable sources of power generation, and the shift in China away from an especially coal-intensive model of growth and infrastructure development. As such, sustained growth for coal demand appears highly unlikely.”
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A view of Consumers Energy’s J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Mich. Credit: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Midwestern electricity ratepayers will pay the still-mounting tab under a plan Consumers Energy reported to regulators and investors.
The Trump administration’s emergency order to keep the huge J.H. Campbell coal plant on Lake Michigan operating past its planned retirement date has cost at least $80 million since May, its operator, Consumers Energy, told regulators and investors this week.
The company said in its third-quarter earnings report Thursday that it would pursue the process laid out in the U.S. Department of Energy’s order for collecting those costs: It will seek payment from ratepayers across the Midwest.
Even though the peak summer electricity demand season has passed, executives at Consumers, Michigan’s largest energy provider, said that they see no sign of let-up in the emergency orders.
“We expect those to continue for the long-term,” said CEO Garrick Rochow in a conference call for investors. “And we’re prepared to continue to operate the plant and comply with those orders.”
He said the costs—$615,385 per day—should be shared beyond the 1.9 million electricity customers of Consumers Energy. The company plans to propose the tab be split among ratepayers (an estimated 42 million to 45 million electricity customers) in the nine states served by the regional electric grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO).
“The benefits go to MISO,” Rochow said. “Not just to our customers, they go to MISO.”
Rochow said the Trump administration envisioned this approach. “That order from the Department of Energy has laid out a clear path to cost recovery,” he said. Consumers Energy will have to apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in order to pass the costs to the ratepayers, and states that oppose such a cost allocation could move to intervene in those proceedings.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued two consecutive 90-day orders—on May 23 and on Aug. 20—to keep the Campbell plant open under the emergency provisions of the Federal Power Act. In the past, such orders have been used to ensure energy delivery at times of natural disasters. But Wright used the act to execute Trump’s agenda to ramp up energy production, saying Campbell needed to stay open to minimize the risk of power outages and address critical grid security issues in the Midwest.
The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Campbell cost figures, nor did MISO. When he extended the Campbell order in August, Wright said that he was directing MISO “to take every step to minimize cost to the American people.”
“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power,” he said in that statement.
But critics say the operation of the 63-year-old plant is generating unnecessary costs as well as pollution. In a September regulatory filing challenging the DOE’s order, a coalition of environmental groups pointed out that even on the day of highest peak demand this summer, MISO had an unused surplus of resources greater than 10 times the power provided by the Campbell plant.
And indeed, according to recent Environmental Protection Agency data, two of the three units at the Campbell plant were not operating at all for about 30 days of the 131 days from the start of the DOE order through Sept. 30. The third unit at the plant only ran for 18 days. Such stoppages could occur for maintenance or simply because the grid operator did not call on the plant to deliver energy to the grid.
“Forcing this unnecessary coal plant to keep operating is bilking consumers for the benefit of the coal industry,” said Michael Lenoff, senior attorney for Earthjustice, which is representing the environmental groups.
Because DOE did not respond to their petition for reconsideration of the Campbell order within 30 days, the environmental groups and the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois have asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case. The purpose of the litigation, Lenoff said, is “to stop the administration from harming consumers, trampling markets and unlawfully usurping the authority of states and regulators to make decisions in the public interest.”
Campbell is by far the largest of three fossil fuel electricity plants that are staying open beyond their planned retirements under Trump administration emergency orders. Campbell released 6.6 million metric tons of carbon in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Talen Energy’s Wagner plant near Baltimore and Constellation Energy’s Eddystone plant just south of Philadelphia, both run on oil and natural gas. Some detail on their costs for keeping open may emerge next week, when Talen and Constellation report their third-quarter earnings.
Consumers Energy, which is continuing to work toward its previously stated goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, had projected that the retirement of the Campbell plant would save its customers $600 million over the next 20 years, or $30 million per year. Instead, running the plant for the past five months has cost close to three times that annual amount.
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A coal power station in Ohio, US. Donald Trump has declared his support for coal and other fossil fuels. Photograph: Jason Whitman/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Bleak report finds greenhouse gas emissions are still rising despite ‘exponential’ growth of renewables
Coal use hit a record high around the world last year despite efforts to switch to clean energy, imperilling the world’s attempts to rein in global heating.
The share of coal in electricity generation dropped as renewable energy surged ahead. But the general increase in power demand meant that more coal was used overall, according to the annual State of Climate Action report, published on Wednesday.
The report painted a grim picture of the world’s chances of avoiding increasingly severe impacts from the climate crisis. Countries are falling behind the targets they have set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which have continued to rise, albeit at a lower rate than before.
Clea Schumer, a research associate at the World Resources Institute thinktank, which led the report, said: “There’s no doubt that we are largely doing the right things. We are just not moving fast enough. One of the most concerning findings from our assessment is that for the fifth report in our series in a row, efforts to phase out coal are well off track.”
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Carbon capture faces significant skepticism from environmentalists who note that the industry’s past is littered with failed projects, missed targets, and an overall net increase in emissions. Credit: Matt Hrkac (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)NDLA,
CCS can “no longer be considered an unlimited” climate solution, researchers caution after concluding most storage options are in risky regions
As the Trump administration seeks to wipe away environmental rules covering the oil, gas, and coal industries, fossil fuel producers and sellers are reassuring buyers that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could slash climate-altering emissions from a growing range of fossil-fuel projects — like blue hydrogen, LNG export terminals, and data centers.
“That’s right: data centers,” fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil wrote in December, adding that the need for more data centers for AI could represent a fifth of the world’s demand for carbon capture by 2050.
Now, a study published in the journal Nature calls attention to another issue that could loom in the future if CCS were to really take off — a lack of easy-to-develop locations where captured carbon can be buried underground.
The vast majority of places where you can find the kinds of sedimentary rocks that allow carbon dioxide to be stored underground sit in higher risk zones or in areas like the Arctic that are potentially off-limits for practical or political reasons, the study found.
That has big implications for the energy transition, since once carbon dioxide is put into storage, it’s supposed to stay there for as long as possible. Any storage sites we use today can’t be expected to be available for future generations — not just the children and grandchildren of people alive today but “more than ten generations into the future,” the study notes.
“This study should be a gamechanger for carbon storage,” coauthor Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said in a statement when the study was announced. “It can no longer be considered an unlimited solution to bring our climate back to a safe level. Instead, geological storage space needs to be thought of as a scarce resource that should be managed responsibly to allow a safe climate future for humanity.”
In fact, there may be only enough practical storage to potentially reverse between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming — a tiny fraction of the five or six degrees experts previously estimated, the researchers said.
The carbon storage that is available “should be used to halt and reverse global warming,” Rogelj added, “and not be wasted on offsetting on-going and avoidable CO2 pollution from fossil electricity production or outdated combustion engines.”
On Track to ‘Overshoot’
International plans to limit climate change tend to assume that we can “overshoot” on climate pollution, pushing the Earth’s climate into dangerous territory past 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming. That’s because, the argument goes, carbon capture and storage could come to the rescue if we go too far, letting us draw carbon dioxide levels back down.
The new study calls that assumption into question, highlighting uncertainty about how effective carbon removal will be at curbing climate change, in addition to concerns over difficulties in accessing underground carbon storage.
“With current trends suggesting warming up to 3°C this century, using all of the safe geological storage wouldn’t even get us back to 2°C,” said lead author Matthew Gidden, research professor at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland.
Industry estimates, like those from the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), suggest the world has plenty of storage potential to keep 14,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide buried below ground and out of the atmosphere.
That would be “more than enough to meet projected needs for CCUS [carbon capture, use and sequestration] over the coming century,” the OGCI wrote in a 2023 report it called a “playbook for regulators, industrial emitters and hub developers.”
The new study, however, takes a closer look at where that storage is located — and in particular whether it’s in regions at higher risk of earthquakes or groundwater contamination like locations deep in the ocean, or in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. The study concludes that nearly 90 percent of that storage capacity is in less-than-desirable locations.
The researchers estimate there’s just 1,460 gigatons worth of “prudent” storage available worldwide — a tenth of the industry estimates.
Some earlier estimates stretch even higher, suggesting there’s around 40,000 gigatons of CO2 storage capacity worldwide.
“These estimates are also important as they remove all the technical constraints from assessment and assume that cost and engineering challenges will pose no issue in the future,” coauthor Siddharth Joshi, a research scholar at the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group, told DeSmog, adding that “the shock value of technical potentials is enough to sometimes drive an industry forward.”
At the same time, focusing only on larger capacity estimates can create a “false sense of abundance,” Gidden noted, if policy-makers think the world has more room for overshoot than carbon storage can really offer.
The Nature study raises big questions about how the world’s carbon storage should be used long term.
“As [the study authors] point out, if we act to reduce emissions now, we probably have enough storage, but that ceases to be true really, really soon,” Rob Anex, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches carbon capture technology, told Canada’s CBC News. “Global emission rates are so high that the window of time in which geologic storage is practical is shutting really, really fast.”
Trump Backs Carbon Capture Subsidies
Despite the federal government’s retreat from climate action, including Trump’s January executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the Trump administration has moved to protect and expand some federal subsidies for CCS.
Lucrative tax credits for using captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery were expanded this summer as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Given this political climate, experts didn’t expect to see a major direct impact from the study for blue hydrogen projects and other proposals aiming to use carbon storage.
“The pragmatist in me says it’s unlikely,” Anika Juhn, energy data analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told DeSmog. “I don’t see government taking those kinds of steps.”
The Nature study follows a precautionary approach to carbon storage, she noted. “The precautionary principle says if we don’t really know about it, then maybe we shouldn’t be rushing headlong into just applying this technology everywhere as fast as possible,” she said. “I think that’s really where the strength of it is, saying if you are interested in doing it safely, here are some key aspects that you should really focus on.”
“Because their estimate is so prudent, it really doesn’t reflect at all current industry practice,” Juhn noted.
So far, there’s not a lot of carbon storage operating worldwide, with the Nature study pointing out existing projects currently store just 49 megatons per year, with 416 megatons worth “either planned or in construction.” Meanwhile, annual global emissions from fossil fuels topped 37,400 megatons last year, according to the World Meteorological Organization, another record high.
But that small CCS industry has already caused significant safety incidents — including well blowouts and a major 2020 CO2 pipeline leak that hospitalized dozens of people.
Concerns over the potential for groundwater contamination — one of the factors highlighted in the Nature study — have already begun curbing real-world carbon storage availability at the state and local level.
Take, for example, Illinois, home to the nation’s first dedicated carbon storage project, the Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) carbon storage site in Decatur, Illinois.
Carbon injections were halted at ADM’s site a year ago, after the company discovered leaks below ground. “Given the extreme depth and the multiple layers of shale and other confining rock up to the surface, at no time was there an impact to the surface or groundwater sources, nor any threat to public health,” ADM said at the end of August, announcing the restart of operations at its Decatur site.
But the incident appears to have hit a nerve in the state, where nearly a million people rely on the Mahomet Aquifer in Champaign, Illinois, as their sole source of drinking water.
This summer, Illinois passed a law banning carbon storage below that aquifer, making roughly 15 percent of the state’s counties off limits for carbon storage. ADM’s leak had reached within about six miles of the Mahomet Aquifer, Taxpayers for Common Sense notes.
The Nature study notes that most of the carbon storage in operation today doesn’t actually offer any net climate benefit — because it’s used for enhanced oil recovery, which, the researchers wrote, “overall results in net-positive CO2 emissions.”
“After decades of bold projections, only around 10 million tons of CO₂ are captured and permanently stored each year (excluding enhanced oil recovery), representing less than 0.03% of annual global fossil fuel emissions,” Kevin Anderson, professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, said in a statement responding to the study. “Rather than serving as a credible mitigation technology, CCS has largely functioned as a rhetorical device to delay robust fossil fuel regulation.”
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