CCS Alone Can't Tackle Oil Emissions, Models Show

Oil companies are setting increasingly ambitious carbon capture and storage (CCS) targets and some are even suggesting this could allow oil and gas production to stabilize in a net-zero world. The problem is emissions, not fossil fuels, they argue, so if the former were canceled, the latter could survive. Climate models indeed say that CCS is indispensable to achieve net-zero emissions. But they also show that the most important prerequisite would be the massive phasedown of fossil fuels. Energy Intelligence calculations suggest that even if CCS became a huge multibillion-ton industry and coal was fully phased out, oil and gas production would still need to shrink by well over 50% by 2050 to reach net zero since CCS can only ramp up so much.