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Leaders around the world are banking on tech advances to solve climate change. One leading idea involves capturing carbon pollution from the air and then burying it underground forever. It sounds practical. Here’s why there's no conceivable way it can work: (THREAD)

2/ It’s called Carbon Capture & Storage. To make it work, we’d need to capture CO2 pollution in multiple ways: • Trap it from smoke stacks • Absorb it from the air with grasses/trees, then capture it from those plants when they’re burned for fuel • Scrub it from the air with giant fans

3/ Then we would pump all that captured CO2 into porous rock deep beneath the earth’s surface.

4/ A U.N. analysis suggests that countries must inject 6 billion tons of CO2 underground each YEAR by the middle of this century in order to hit modest targets that avoid the worst consequences. But just getting all that CO2 out of the atmosphere is a daunting task...

5/ Imagine the neighborhoods and parks near oil, gas or coal-fired industrial plants. We would need to add equipment to capture the CO2 from each facility, in some cases doubling its land footprint.

6/ All that additional carbon-absorbing plant life that's needed? We would have to devote about 768,000 square miles of land worldwide to growing it. That would cover an area roughly the size of Mexico — and compete for valuable land used to grow food or sustain forests.

7/ Capturing carbon is just the first part. Before billions of tons of CO2 can be stored underground, it has to be transported to those storage sites...

8/ The U.S. alone could require building 68,000+ miles of new pipelines in about two decades. That’s more than double the distance to fly around the earth and longer than the U.S. interstate highway system. Globally, pipelines could tally in the hundreds of thousands of miles.

9/ And to cross the oceans, we’d need at least 85 specially built tankers to move the high-pressured gas. As of April 2026, there were only three ships in the world equipped to do that.

10/ Even if you figure out how to capture and transport 6 billion tons of CO2 a year, where are you going to put it all?

11/ Only 12 large-scale geologic reservoirs have attempted to permanently store CO2 pollution. We’d need more than 2,000 such reservoirs for carbon capture and storage to work, each requiring years of study and engineering before it could be used.

12/ The few test sites that exist suggest that keeping carbon underground may not work at scale. Many CCS sites in operation — in Norway, Algeria, Australia and the U.S. — have been mired in problems, pointing to enormous challenges ahead.

14/ Climate experts know about the costs, technical troubles and failures of CCS test projects. Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology, even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.

15/ This is just a small piece of Carbon Captured, our new, ongoing investigative series with Drilled, looking at how the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself. Follow the series here: projects.propublica.org/carbon-captu...

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