Around the world in 22 carbon capture projects

2014-10-13 09:00 by Anja Reitz

Avoiding dangerous climate change is still possible but will cost more than twice as much if we don't have plenty of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

That's what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded earlier this year.

If the world is going to avoid dangerous warming then CCS is probably going to play a pretty important role. The executive director of the International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven says it is "essential". Former UK chief scientist David King has  called CCS "the only hope for mankind".

So the opening of the world's first major power station CCS project at Boundary Dam in Canada is being hailed as a historic milestone in efforts to tackle climate change.

Boundary Dam is significant because it's the first commercial scale power station to use the technology, even if CCS is fitted to just one of its generating units.

So where in the world is CCS being developed, and how much carbon will be captured?

We take you around the world in 22 CCS projects that are operational or under construction according to the Global CCS Institute.

The current state of CCS

North America has the largest number of CCS projects by far. The US boasts 16 of the 22 operational or under construction schemes and the lion's share of capture capacity, as the map below shows.

We've plotted the location and size of the world'c CCS on this map. The full, interactive Carbon Brief map is available over at  CartoDB.

The UK doesn't feature on the map. There are five planned CCS projects in the UK but none has reached the construction phase, let alone started operating. Their progress has been rocky at best, despite a government pledge of £1 billion in funding.

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Source: BLOG, the carbon brief

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