Global underground CO2 storage hit a record 43.6 million tonnes in 2024, new register shows

Operators of carbon capture and storage projects worldwide put a record 43.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ground in 2024, according to the 2026 annual report of the London Register of Subsurface CO2 Storage, a tracking project run by researchers at Imperial College London. The figure is more than double the 21 million tonnes recorded in 2016 and marks the fourth consecutive annual high since the register began compiling comparable data.

The report puts cumulative underground storage since 1996 at 421.7 million tonnes, spread across 70 projects in 17 countries on six continents. New Zealand and Italy appear in the register for the first time this year.

Where the carbon is going

The totals are uneven. Brazil's Petrobras Santos Basin pre-salt oil field alone reported 14.2 million tonnes in 2024, close to a third of the global figure, as part of a project that injects carbon dioxide separated from natural gas back into the reservoir it came from. The United States contributed the largest number of individual projects, 23 in all, for a combined 20.2 million tonnes, while China reported 1.7 million tonnes, aided by the newly counted Daqing Aonan oilfield, and Australia reported a similar amount from projects including the Moomba facility in South Australia. Norway's Northern Lights project, built to receive carbon dioxide shipped from industrial sites elsewhere in Europe and inject it beneath the North Sea, began operations in August 2025 and will show up in next year's figures.

Early, incomplete reporting for 2025 already shows 36.2 million tonnes from 29 projects in 12 countries, though several large American sites had not yet filed updated figures at the time the report was compiled, according to the register's data page, which also shows the full 2026 annual report, a methodology document and an independent assessment by the Norwegian risk-management firm DNV becoming publicly downloadable this week.

A number that keeps moving

The register's compilers revised their own prior-year figures downward in the new edition. Cumulative storage through 2023 was cut from 351.4 million tonnes to 342 million tonnes, a reduction of 2.7 percent, after the team reinterpreted data from Oklahoma's North Burbank Unit to account for carbon dioxide that had been recovered and reinjected rather than newly stored, corrected what it describes as double-counting between company-level and project-level reporting, and revised figures tied to Norway's long-running Sleipner project using updated national greenhouse gas inventories.

That kind of correction points to a broader problem the researchers highlight in the new report: most stored carbon dioxide, 82.3 percent of the cumulative total, comes from projects that inject it to help extract more oil, a technique known as enhanced oil recovery. Roughly a third of the carbon dioxide counted in that category, 112.5 million tonnes, is recorded simply as "injected," without a clear accounting of how much of it is later brought back to the surface with produced oil and reinjected again, which risks double-counting the same molecules of carbon dioxide year after year. The researchers say a dedicated analysis of that uncertainty is planned for a future report.

Who is watching the numbers

The register is maintained by Professor Samuel Krevor and Dr Xiaowei Gao of Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, with a consortium of more than 30 contributors from institutions including Stanford, MIT, the Global CCS Institute, the Carbon Capture & Storage Association, IEAGHG and Australia's CSIRO, and funding from the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering. Its findings are watched closely by governments that have built carbon capture and storage into their climate plans, by oil and gas companies running enhanced-recovery projects that double as storage sites, and by investors and policymakers deciding how much weight the technology can bear in meeting the Paris Agreement's goals. The register's inaugural edition, published last November during the COP30 climate summit, was the first attempt to produce a single, source-traceable tally of the practice worldwide, drawing on operator disclosures, government inventories and public datasets rather than any one country's regulatory filings.

"Geological CO2 storage has become a global enterprise," Krevor said of the new figures, adding that the practice is "demonstrated as a large-scale mitigation technology."

Gao, the register's executive director, framed the project's purpose around accountability rather than advocacy. "That transparency matters if geological CO2 storage is to earn the confidence of policymakers and investors," she said, according to the report's release materials.

What comes next

The scale of the task ahead dwarfs the current totals. Krevor has said that meeting the Paris Agreement's 1.5 degree Celsius target under most modelled pathways would require geological storage to reach at least a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2050, more than twenty times the 2024 figure. Whether that growth materializes depends on factors well outside the register's remit, including carbon pricing, pipeline infrastructure and public acceptance of storage sites, but the annual report's authors argue that an independently verified baseline is a prerequisite for tracking progress toward that target, whatever the pace turns out to be.

Coverage of the new figures, including a summary carried by Phys.org, began circulating Sunday as the register's embargo on its full dataset, assurance document and project-by-project figures lifted.