The amount of carbon dioxide that can be realistically stored underground each year is less than United Nations estimates show, according to new research from Imperial College London.
Authors of the study, published last week in the journal Nature Communications, said projections compiled by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change overestimated potential CO2 storage because of assumptions tied to geology and other factors.
The researchers from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering said their model offers a more practical outlook for how quickly CO2 storage — a key component in the carbon capture and removal ecosystem — can be scaled up.
“Some of the model estimates compiled by the IPCC maintain rates of growth over multiple decades which are unrealistic and have no precedence in history,” said Yuting Zhang, a doctoral student and lead author of the paper, in an email.
