Earth’s capacity to store carbon could max out surprisingly soon

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By Mohana Basu, Nature. 

Excerpt: The planet’s capacity to store carbon-dioxide emissions in rock formations is much smaller than previous estimates suggest, and it could run out as early as 2200, according to a study1 published in Nature today. To meet the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement — limiting global warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures — vast amounts of CO2 will need to be removed from the atmosphere. One way to do that is to capture CO2 produced by industry and store it deep underground. Researchers report that Earth can safely store around 1,460 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) — a number much lower than the 10,000–40,000 GtCO₂ often cited in previous studies2. At present, carbon capture and storage technologies remove only 49 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, with a further 416 million tonnes per year in planned capacity, say the authors of the study. But to stay within the Paris target, annual carbon storage would need to rise to 8.7 GtCO₂ by mid-century — a 175-fold increase over the next three decades.... 

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