Originally published November 20, 2013. Updated August 3, 2026.
Carbon capture and storage has 77 projects running worldwide right now, with 47 more under construction, according to the Global CCS Institute’s 2025 status report. Coal-fired power plants were supposed to be the technology’s proving ground, and the two flagship coal retrofits, Petra Nova in Texas and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, both missed their own capture targets. Direct air capture is newer and smaller, and the tax credit that funds a lot of this work, Section 45Q, changed again under a 2025 law.
The short answer, in tonnes
Add up every carbon capture and storage project running today and you land somewhere around 45 million tonnes of CO2 captured a year, based on a widely cited tally of Global CCS Institute and IEA data. That figure is from 2023, and it predates the additional projects the Global CCS Institute counted in its 2025 status report, so the real total captured today is probably higher. Even the older number works out to roughly 0.1 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions, which is the scale carbon capture and storage operates at today. A single plant capturing a million tonnes a year is a real industrial project with real engineering behind it, and against what the world emits every year, it’s a rounding error.
What carbon capture and storage means
Carbon capture and storage means catching carbon dioxide before it leaves a smokestack, or pulling it directly out of the air, then compressing it and piping it into rock deep underground built to hold it. An earlier Energy Collective piece by Kevin Grandia called the coal version of this idea coal’s “pipe dream,” arguing the technology wouldn’t rescue coal’s carbon problem. Coal plants faced added regulatory pressure to cut their carbon output around the same period, which Energy Collective covers separately in its Clean Power Plan explainer.
That label held up for coal. It hasn’t held up as cleanly for direct air capture and industrial capture, which barely existed in commercial form when the original piece ran. The next two sections walk through what happened when coal plants and direct air capture plants tried to prove it wrong.
Coal’s flagship plants missed their own targets
Two coal-fired plants built carbon capture at commercial scale, and both explain why the pipe-dream label stuck. Petra Nova, a unit at the W.A. Parish plant in Texas, started up in 2017 rated to capture about 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year, roughly a third of that unit’s emissions. It missed its own three-year capture goal by 17 percent before its owners shut it down on May 1, 2020, citing low oil prices. New owners JX Nippon and Eneos restarted the plant on September 5, 2023.
Boundary Dam, in Saskatchewan, was designed to capture up to 90 percent of one unit’s CO2, about a million tonnes a year at full output. In 2015, its first year running, it operated only about 40 percent of the time and delivered roughly 400,000 of the 800,000 tonnes it had contracted to supply, triggering a $12 million penalty. Neither retrofit turned coal capture into something routine, which is part of the wider trend Energy Collective tracks in its coal decline coverage.
Direct air capture is real but still tiny
Direct air capture works differently from smokestack capture. Instead of a concentrated exhaust stream, giant fans pull ordinary air across a chemical filter that grabs the CO2 out of it. It’s newer and much smaller than capture at power plants. About 53 DAC plants were operating worldwide by the end of 2024, according to Wikipedia’s tally of IEA data. That same tally projects that by 2030, 93 plants could be running with a combined capacity of 6.4 to 11.4 million tonnes a year.
The gap between a plant’s rated capacity and what it delivers can be wide. Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland, per Wikipedia, activated in May 2024, is rated to capture 36,000 tonnes a year. Its earlier Orca plant, running since 2021, is rated at 4,000 tonnes a year by that same tally, but a 2025 investigation by the outlet Heimildin found it averaged only about 600 tonnes annually, a figure that comes from that investigation, not from Climeworks itself.
Where the captured carbon goes
Capturing the CO2 is only half of “carbon capture and storage.” What happens to it afterward is the other half, and the industry counts both outcomes the same way. About 90 percent of existing CCS capacity has gone toward enhanced oil recovery instead of pure geologic storage, according to Wikipedia’s 2023-24 estimate. The captured CO2 mostly gets pumped underground to push more oil out of aging wells. Permanent storage, with no oil recovery attached, is the smaller use, and it’s the one that keeps the carbon out of circulation for good. Both outcomes get counted as “storage” in industry tallies, but they leave a reader with two different answers about what a given project’s capture number means. That 90 percent figure is a global average, not a fact about any single plant, so check which path a project uses before taking its capture number at face value.
The 45Q tax credit changed again in 2025
The credit that underwrites a lot of this work is Section 45Q of the federal tax code. To qualify at all, a project has to hit a minimum size, and its captured CO2 earns a base rate depending on the pathway:
| Pathway | Minimum to qualify | Base 45Q credit |
|---|---|---|
| Direct air capture | 1,000 tons a year | $36 per ton |
| Power plants | 18,750 tons a year | $17 per ton |
| Other industrial facilities | 12,500 tons a year | $17 per ton |
Source: IRS, Instructions for Form 8933. Rates shown are before any bonus multipliers.
Congress amended 45Q again in 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025, restructured the credit’s rules for CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery and added new restrictions on facilities tied to certain foreign entities, effective for equipment placed in service after that date. How the new law reshapes the dollar figures for each pathway is still being worked out in follow-up guidance, so the table above reflects only the base rates the IRS currently publishes.
What would change the answer
The number worth watching is the gap between projects announced and projects running. The Global CCS Institute counts 47 more projects under construction beyond the 77 operating today, and whether most of those finish on schedule will move the real capture total more than any single new plant. The same test applies to direct air capture. Wikipedia’s tally of 93 plants and up to 11.4 million tonnes of capacity by 2030 is still a projection, not a delivered number, and Orca’s gap between its rated 4,000 tonnes and its reported 600 tonnes a year is a reason to wait for verified output before trusting a nameplate figure. Petra Nova and Boundary Dam already showed that the plants that get built aren’t always the plants that hit their targets. We’d watch the tonnes a project delivers before its ribbon-cutting headline.
