This week ProPublica teamed up with the climate-advocacy outlet Drilled to publish a piece arguing that there is “no conceivable way” carbon capture and storage (CCS) can address climate change. Like much of what ProPublica has written over the years that is associated with the oil and natural gas industry, this flashy report is wrong on so many details.
To start, the world’s leading energy and climate organizations have come to a different conclusion on CCS. The International Energy Agency has stated outright that “reaching net zero will be virtually impossible without CCUS,” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report concludes that carbon capture is necessary to counterbalance the emissions from other sources.
Again, this is not the first time ProPublica has targeted the energy industry. The outlet has been putting out hit pieces for the better part of a decade. Unsurprisingly, the collaboration with Drilled, a project that pushes “climate accountability” advocacy against fossil fuels, runs the same playbook.
We also can’t help but point out the irony of all this: a group of “journalists” who have been pretty transparent about their advocacy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are trying to raise doubts about a technology that will – wait for it – reduce greenhouse gas emissions! These are the kinds of projects that raise legitimate questions about whether the aim is actually to reduce emissions – or to just find another way to attack fossil fuel companies.
In any event, let’s take a look at how this piece missed the mark repeatedly.
CLAIM: Carbon capture is one of the oil-industry’s favored climate “solutions”, in ProPublica’s view, CCS “would not require the public to stop using oil and gas.”
FACT: The world’s leading scientific and energy authorities back CCS as a real emission reduction tool and, ironically, so does ProPublica’s own source.
The outlet buried the admission in its Notes on Data Sources, where the International Energy Agency spokesperson consulted for the story confirms that “CCS remains a part of the solution portfolio for industries that might otherwise be hard to decarbonize,” and notes that a record number of CCS projects are now under construction. Interesting, isn’t it?
And the IEA spokesperson is not alone:
- The European Union Commission determined that the bloc cannot meet its legally binding 2050 climate target without capturing and storing or using roughly 450 million tons of CO2 a year.
- The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the systems for transporting and storing captured CO2 are “mature.”
- The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that deep decarbonization is “technically feasible” and folded carbon capture directly into its pathways to net zero.
- The Congressional Research Service reported that the United States cannot zero out its hardest emissions through cuts alone; CO2 capture and removal have to close the gap.
- Princeton’s Net-Zero study, the most detailed U.S. decarbonization roadmap yet produced, identifies carbon capture as one of six essential pillars of a net-zero American economy.
- Finally, the IPCC says every credible pathway to net zero leans on carbon capture and removal, not on deep emissions cuts by themselves. CCS isn’t a panacea, but neither are any of the other emissions reducing technologies available to us.
CLAIM: ProPublica argues CCS barely exists in practice, that we are “permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.”
FACT: That’s a snapshot of a young industry mid-ramp, not the ceiling.
A snapshot of a starting line tells you nothing about the race. In the last year alone, two major projects have come online that demonstrate the inaccuracies of ProPublica’s statements:
- In August 2025, Norway’s Northern Lights project switched on the world’s first commercial, open-access CO2 transport-and-storage hub, pulling CO2 from the Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik and injecting it 2,600 meters beneath the seabed.
- On the U.S. Gulf Coast, ExxonMobil fired up its second commercial CCS operation in Louisiana this year and began storing up to two million tons a year from CF Industries’ Donaldsonville ammonia complex. ExxonMobil has captured 120 million tons of CO2 to date.
- The Moomba project in South Australia’s is also considered a major success. Since launching in late 2024, the joint venture between Santos and Beach Energy has safely and permanently sequestered 2 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
And Rystad Energy projects CO2 capture capacity climbing more than tenfold to roughly 550 million tons a year by 2030, with costs sliding toward $75–$100 a ton.
CLAIM: ProPublica argues CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery proves nothing, because EOR “isn’t designed to function the same way and it’s monitored as stringently.”
FACT: Operators have injected CO2 underground safely since 1974, moving it through more than 4,500 miles of existing U.S. CO2 pipeline.
Thanks to data from enhanced oil recovery (EOR), we literally have a half a century of evidence that the gas stays underground plus the subsurface know-how now powering dedicated storage. And dedicated geologic storage is already live: Northern Lights injects into a saline aquifer; ExxonMobil is moving from enhanced oil recovery to dedicated Class VI storage; Oxy stores up to 20 million tons of CO2 underground every year and it’s turning that exact expertise towards permanent storage. The Clean Air Task Force has also found that EOR results in a 37 percent reduction in CO2 emissions per barrel compared to conventional oil production, providing tangible environmental benefits.
CLAIM: ProPublica says “taxpayers are paying oil and gas companies $85 for every metric ton they put underground,” a tab it projects could reach $500 billion a year by 2050.
FACT: The 45Q tax credit is performance-based, meaning a company can only access the credit if it actually captures and stores CO2, and is verified.
Notably, 45Q supporters run from environmental groups to labor unions:
- The Carbon Capture Coalition, convened by the Great Plains Institute, calls 45Q the “foundational policy mechanism” for scaling carbon management.
- The Utility Workers Union of America notes the credit enjoys “broad, bipartisan and bicameral support.”
- And Congress reaffirmed exactly that, preserving and even raising 45Q in the tax law President Trump signed in July 2025.
The half-trillion-dollar calculation simply multiplies today’s credit by a mid-century target and ignores that costs fall as the industry scales. At the same time, ProPublica can’t simultaneously argue that the costs of CCS will allegedly be a burden to taxpayers while also saying the technology does not work. This contradiction proves their analysis is a fallacy.
CLAIM: ProPublica holds up solar as “the technology that has thrived” and casts CCS as a costly distraction from it.
FACT: Cement, steel and chemicals account for roughly 30 percent of global industrial emissions, and much of that CO2 comes from the chemistry itself, as ovens convert limestone into clinker.
No amount of renewable electricity can help offset those emissions. The Brevik plant already captures about 400,000 tons a year and Heidelberg pre-sold its entire 2025 run of near-zero-carbon cement.
Peer-reviewed analysis finds that steel smelt-reduction paired with carbon capture is an economically viable solution, and in fertilizers, CF Industries uses CCS to cut a plant’s emissions by about half. That’s why the European Union calls CCS “indispensable” for these process emissions.
CLAIM: ProPublica warns CCS “could require building more than 68,000 miles of new pipelines” in the United States, plus dozens of specialized tankers when only three exist today.
FACT: Infrastructure scales with demand, and America has done this before.
The United States has the largest pipeline network in the world, operating over 2.5 million miles of pipelines transporting natural gas, oil, and petroleum products. Similarly, the United States already operates more than 4,500 miles of CO2 pipeline, built over decades. Purpose-built CO2 carriers are entering service now, including the ships already serving Northern Lights. The 68,000-mile figure comes from a maximal net-zero scenario; the tanker count is simply where a brand-new fleet starts.
The Bottom Line
CCS deserves a real debate. How fast it scales, how to build durable policy support, how to site projects with genuine community buy-in. The industry should take those questions head-on. And based on what has happened over the past couple of years, as steel in the ground is accelerating, they are.
But that’s not the debate ProPublica picked. To argue carbon capture “can’t conceivably” work, the piece had to reach back to a 22-year-old academic paper and cherry pick the IEA and IPCC. Out in the real world, CCS projects store their CO2 permanently today, cutting emissions while America keeps producing the energy and products families and businesses count on.
We expect to see more of these kinds of anti-CCS “reports,” as the environmental community’s efforts to stop the American shale revolution failed. They tried to ban gas stoves, but that failed too. Attacking CCS is another means of trying to achieve the same ends: stopping American energy companies from growing and solving problems.
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