How a Guessed Scientific Consensus Locked Billions into Carbon Capture

2026-10-31 global

Geneva, Friday, 30 October 2026.
A 2005 secret vote substituted expert guesses for empirical data, driving hundreds of billions into unproven carbon storage while just 12 global facilities bury less carbon than one power plant emits.

The 2005 Oviedo Vote: When Guesswork Replaced Data

In the spring of 2005, a closed-door meeting in Oviedo, Spain, convened by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would alter the trajectory of global climate policy for decades. Attended by over 100 scientists, including Sally Benson of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Bert Metz of the U.N., the gathering sought to finalize a 431-page special report on carbon capture and storage (CCS). The report’s conclusions hinged not on empirical evidence but on an unconventional ‘expert elicitation’ survey proposed by physicist David Keith. Scientists were asked to provide their best estimates on the long-term efficacy of carbon storage—a methodology later criticized as ‘one of the worst things you can do’ by Roger Cooke, lead author of a subsequent IPCC report [1]. At the time, only three large-scale CCS experiments existed globally, with one in Norway’s North Sea showing unexpected CO₂ migration 700 feet upward through geologic formations, casting doubt on storage reliability [1]. Despite scant evidence, the resulting IPCC report asserted that well-managed storage sites would retain at least 99% of injected carbon for 1,000 years, a claim central to legitimizing CCS as a climate mitigation tool [1].

From Scientific Consensus to Industrial Policy

The 2005 IPCC report’s endorsement of CCS had immediate and far-reaching consequences. It framed carbon capture as a viable method to offset fossil fuel emissions, predicting it could lower the cost of stabilizing CO₂ concentrations by at least 30% and account for up to 55% of climate mitigation efforts by 2100 [1]. This language directly influenced policymakers and investors, triggering a wave of public subsidies and corporate capital expenditures. Fossil fuel companies, including Shell, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco, gained representation in the IPCC process following pressure from oil-exporting nations, embedding industry perspectives into the scientific consensus [1]. By the time the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, CCS had transitioned from a speculative technology to a cornerstone of global decarbonization strategies. Yet even as the report’s lead authors, including Benson, acknowledged the lack of hard science, the damage was done: the narrative that CCS could ‘save’ fossil fuels by capturing their emissions had taken root [1].

The Disconnect: Promises vs. Reality

Three decades after the Oviedo vote, the gap between CCS’s potential and its actual performance has become glaring. A ProPublica investigation reveals that despite the IPCC’s optimistic projections, only 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been built globally since 1996. Collectively, these projects bury less CO₂ annually than a single coal-fired power plant emits—about 36 million metric tons compared to the 40 million metric tons a typical plant releases in a year [1]. The failures are stark: BP’s In Salah project in Algeria, hailed as a model in 2005, was abandoned in 2012 after leaks and pressure issues forced its shutdown [1][alert! ‘Project abandoned after leaks and pressure issues’]. Shell’s $1 billion Quest facility in Canada, connected to oil sands operations, achieved a 68% capture rate instead of the promised 90% and triggered microearthquakes [1]. Chevron’s Gorgon project in Australia, operational since 2019, injected only a quarter of its collected CO₂ in its first operating year ending in 2025 due to clogged wells and pressure spikes [1]. These underperformance issues are not anomalies but systemic, tied to material integrity challenges across the CCS value chain, from pipeline corrosion to geological containment risks [5].

Capital Misallocation and the Fossil Fuel Lifeline

The 2005 IPCC report’s endorsement of CCS did more than skew scientific discourse—it redirected hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology that, despite its promises, has failed to scale. The U.N. itself now acknowledges that achieving climate goals may require building a CCS industry the size of the global oil production sector by 2050, a herculean task given the technology’s current trajectory [1]. In the U.K., the government has earmarked £24 billion ($30 billion) for CCS projects, a sum exceeding the combined budgets of the U.S., EU, Norway, and Japan for similar initiatives [4]. This spending occurs as the U.K. plans to slash grants for heat pump installations, a proven technology, to fund defense—highlighting a misalignment between policy and evidence [4]. Environmentalists like Chris Packham have condemned CCS as a ‘tech fairytale,’ arguing that public funds are being squandered on projects with ‘ludicrously uncertain results’ while proven solutions like renewables and electrification are starved of investment [4]. The irony is palpable: fossil fuel companies, which pushed for CCS to preserve their business models, continue to benefit from subsidies even as their own internal projections—including ExxonMobil’s 2018 prediction of negligible CCS deployment by 2050—undercut the technology’s viability [1].

The IPCC’s Evolving Stance and the Path Forward

As of October 2026, the IPCC is preparing for its Sixty-Fifth Session, scheduled for December, where it will discuss the Work Plan for the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7). Among the topics is new guidance for accounting carbon removals and CCS in national inventories, reflecting a belated recognition of the technology’s shortcomings [3]. Oliver Geden, vice chair of AR7, has criticized the 2005 expert elicitation process as ‘an inappropriate way of assessing the literature,’ while Sally Benson, the scientist who championed CCS in 2005, now concedes that ‘it’s unrealistic’ to expect flawless execution in first-of-a-kind projects [1]. The IPCC’s role, as it states, is to assess the full range of scientific knowledge, yet the 2005 vote’s reliance on guesswork over data created a regulatory and investment framework that persists today [3]. With global CO₂ capture capacity needing to expand from 45 million metric tons per year in 2022 to 6 gigatons per year by 2050 to meet net-zero goals, the urgency to rectify past missteps has never been greater [5]. The question remains: will policymakers and investors finally acknowledge the evidence and pivot to proven solutions, or will they double down on a technology that has repeatedly fallen short?

Sources

Climate policy Carbon capture