In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.

To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.

Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever.

The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground.

The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream.

In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups. Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco.

But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.

But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.

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For many university faculty, the rewards for studying the industry’s favored climate solution have been numerous, opening opportunities, funding papers and raising their profiles. Benson is a clear example. When the IPCC was awarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work, she and her co-authors were recognized among the scientists who contributed. When Stanford University sought a new director for its ExxonMobil-funded climate research center, it tapped her. When President Joe Biden prioritized climate policy, he brought Benson into the White House.

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The record of the industry’s largest CCS sites — ones designed solely to help the climate — has been far more troubled.

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As proof that CCS is on the rise, she pointed to 77 operating CCS projects identified in a report by the industry group the Global CCS Institute and said that another report demonstrated a tenfold growth in CO2 injected underground since 2005.

When ProPublica and Drilled reviewed that same data, however, and excluded the enhanced oil recovery projects, we found just eight operating large-scale carbon burial projects on that list (10 using the group’s more recent data), and half the increase in annual injections that Benson stated.

Experts interviewed for this story insisted — often in an anguished timbre — that CCS simply must work because decades of delay have foreclosed other paths to a stable climatic future.

But just because the world now needs CCS to work doesn’t mean it can.

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“The fraction of CO2 retained underground is likely to be very high,” she told the board, again pointing to the 2005 special report: “This study said 99% over 1,000 years.”

The board set the ambitious goal of burying more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045, more than all the carbon that has ever been geologically stored around the world combined. Since it opened in May, the new project has injected just 7% of its advertised capacity, but California Resources Corp. is now seeking permits for eight more CCS projects across California, and other oil and gas companies have proposed four more, including two that Stanford is directly involved with.

With so little evidence to work with, David Keith, a Canadian physicist, proposed a workaround: The authors could conduct an “expert elicitation,” taking an anonymous survey about what they expected the evidence to eventually show.

At first, not everyone was willing to go along. Some scientists worried that making what amounted to educated guesses would mislead the public, they told Drilled and ProPublica. Benson and Metz, though, both argued that on such an important matter informed advice was better than nothing.

In the end, the group agreed to take the survey and to keep it off the record — they would “burn it afterward,” Keith recounted, making no mention of it in the official report. When the meeting concluded, some of the scientists popped their bottles of cava in celebration.

• Scientists’ Secret Vote: A U.N. climate report legitimized carbon capture and storage, suggesting at least 99% of the CO2 would likely remain underground, despite scant empirical evidence.
• Oil Industry Favorite: Fossil fuel companies have identified carbon capture as a climate solution that will allow their industry to survive, and have pushed the U.N. and scientists to study it.
• Pattern of Underperformance: Decades later, major CO2 storage projects have suffered breakdowns, setbacks and cost overruns, while CCS remains central to climate models and policy.

• Scientists’ Secret Vote: A U.N. climate report legitimized carbon capture and storage, suggesting at least 99% of the CO2 would likely remain underground, despite scant empirical evidence.
• Oil Industry Favorite: Fossil fuel companies have identified carbon capture as a climate solution that will allow their industry to survive, and have pushed the U.N. and scientists to study it.
• Pattern of Underperformance: Decades later, major CO2 storage projects have suffered breakdowns, setbacks and cost overruns, while CCS remains central to climate models and policy.

In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.

To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.

Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever.

The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground.

The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream.

In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups. Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco.

But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.

But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution.