Those 13 projects captured a grand total of 39 million tonnes of CO2 per year, the report found, about one-ten thousandth of the 36 billion tonnes that emitters spewed into the atmosphere in 2021.

The 13 “flagship, large-scale” projects in the analysis account for about 55% of the world’s current carbon capture capacity, the institute says in a release. One of the case studies in the 79-page IEEFA report concludes that the troubled Boundary Dam CCS project in Saskatchewan has missed its carbon capture by about 50%. The report lands just as analysts in the United States warn of major verification problems with a CCS tax credit that received a major boost in the Biden administration’s new climate action plan, and as Canadian fossil fuels lobby for more tax relief to match what’s becoming available in the U.S. After a half-century of research and development, carbon capture and storage projects are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and nearly three-quarters of the carbon dioxide they manage to capture each year is sold off to fossil companies and used to extract more oil, according to a sweeping industry assessment released today by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

Carbon capture