The Carbon Capture Con: Why CCS is a Fraud

Carbon capture and storage sounded seductive right? Keep the coal mines. Keep the gas fields. Keep the LNG export terminals. Keep the profits. Keep the political donations. Then bolt on a giant industrial vacuum cleaner and bury the pollution somewhere underground. That was the promise.

The problem is that the promise hasn’t survived contact with reality. A new investigation has sharpened what climate advocates have known for years: carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has been systematically spruiked by the fossil fuel industry as a way to avoid the one thing we actually need to do - stop burning coal, oil and gas. The investigation found that promoters of CCS have systematically ignored evidence of its limitations, overstated its potential and convinced governments that it can work at world-saving scale when it can’t.

That’s why CCS is a fraud. Not because no molecule of carbon dioxide has ever been captured. It has. Not because geological storage is impossible in every circumstance. It’s not. CCS is a fraud because it’s being sold as a climate solution while functioning as a greenwashing licence for fossil fuel expansion.

The scale problem is fatal

In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that by 2025 the world would need to be burying about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year to avoid dangerous warming. OK, so now its 2026 and we’re nowhere near that. The reality is that the world is currently permanently burying less carbon dioxide than a single large power station can emit in a year. That sentence should end the debate.

After decades of promises, conferences, subsidies, glossy brochures and government strategies, CCS remains tiny compared with the fossil fuel problem it claims to solve.

The Global CCS Institute, which exists to promote the industry, says 77 CCS projects were operational commercial in 2025. They had combined capture capacity of 64 million tonnes per year. Even if we believed those numbers at face value, they’re still barely a rounding error compared global fossil fuel emissions, which are measured in tens of billions of tonnes a year.

And ‘capacity’ is not the same as actual storage. That distinction matters because CCS projects consistently underperform, break down, get suspended, or capture carbon for “utilisation” - especially enhanced oil recovery - rather than permanent climate-safe storage.

The flagship projects keep failing

The fossil fuel industry asks us to judge CCS by its promise. But we should judge it by its record. Canada’s Boundary Dam coal CCS project was meant to prove that coal could be made clean. Instead, it captured less than 60% of the CO₂ emissions over nine years and never achieved its annual 90% capture target.

Australia’s own flagship, Chevron’s Gorgon CCS project in Western Australia, is the killer example. It was supposed to be proof that LNG could be cleaned up. Instead, Gorgon has captured and stored less than 3% of the total emissions from extracting, processing and burning the gas from its fields. That’s not decarbonisation. It’s greenwashing with a pipeline.

Australia is being set up as a carbon dumping ground

And here’s the thing. Australia should be learning from Gorgon. Instead, the Albanese Government and the industry are doubling down. Resources Minister Madeleine King told a CCS symposium in February 2026 that large-scale CCS “must be part” of the net zero effort, despite acknowledging Gorgon’s underperformance.

Santos’ Moomba CCS facility has now received Australian Carbon Credit Units, with the Clean Energy Regulator saying the project is expected to capture up to 1.7 million tonnes of CO₂-e per annum over its crediting period. Meanwhile, Inpex, TotalEnergies and Woodside are all pursuing the Bonaparte CCS project near Darwin which proposed to store 8 to 10 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. The plan is to turn northern Australia into a regional CCS hub.

This is the next stage of the con. First CCS was sold as a way to keep burning fossil fuels domestically. Now it is being sold as a new export industry: Australia as Asia’s carbon graveyard.

But CCS doesn’t cancel the emissions from new gas fields. It doesn’t cancel exported emissions. It doesn’t stop methane leakage. It doesn’t cancel emissions from Singapore or Malaysia. It doesn’t make fracking safe. It doesn’t make LNG clean. And it certainly doesn’t repair damaged Country. It simply gives governments an excuse to keep approving fossil fuel projects.

CCS is not competing with nothing

The other fraud is pretending CCS is our only option. It’s not. Renewables backed by storage are already cleaner, faster and cheaper than coal and gas power. For household energy, electrification works now. For transport, EVs and public transport work now. For much industrial heat, electrification and green hydrogen are advancing. For nature, protecting forests and restoring ecosystems works now.

There may be a narrow role for CCS in genuine hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, steel, fertiliser or some chemical processes. But that’s not how CCS is being used politically. It’s being used to defend new coal and gas. It’s being used to weaken regulation. It’s being used to delay the clean energy transition. It’s being used to turn fossil fuel pollution into a taxpayer-funded business model.

The fraud is the delay

Every year spent pretending CCS will save the fossil fuel industry is a year of more emissions, more heat, more fires, more bleaching, more floods, more dead wildlife and more risk to Country. CCS has had decades to prove itself as a climate-scale solution. It’s failed. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t love CCS because it works. It loves CCS because it lets them say: “Don’t regulate us yet. Don’t stop new gas. Don’t end coal exports. Don’t make us change. The technology is coming.”

But the technology is always coming. Always just over the horizon. Always one more subsidy away. Always one more pilot project away. Always one more glossy conference away. That’s the magic trick. The industry points to a future machine while the present burns. And Australia keeps falling for it.

Time to end the distraction

We don’t need another CCS summit. We don’t need another gas field approved on the promise that someone might bury a fraction of its emissions one day. We don’t need public money poured into technology that really protects private fossil fuel profits. We need honesty!

CCS as a justification for coal and gas expansion is a fraud. The climate doesn’t care about promises and spin. It responds to tonnes of pollution in the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is telling us the truth. It is time to ditch the distraction.

The fossil fuel industry’s greatest trick was convincing us carbon capture would save the climate.