CCS projects database

To study current and historical CCS project plans and their failure rates, we build a dataset of completed, failed and currently planned commercial (at least 0.1 Mt yr⁻¹ capacity) CCS projects starting from 1972—the completion year of the first integrated CCS project (Terrell natural gas processing plant). For each project, we code the capture rate, project announcement and completion year, facility status (for example, active, failed, planned), facility operation start and end years, CO₂ storage type (for example, enhanced oil recovery or dedicated geological storage), sectoral and subsectoral application, country and region (Supplementary Tables 3 and 4). Data on completed and failed projects was collected from annual Global CCS Institute reports as well as dormant and existing databases listing planned CCS projects at different points in time^78–81 (full list in Supplementary Table 2), whereas data on currently planned projects was gathered primarily from the recently published (March 2023) IEA Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Projects Database⁷. These sources were complemented with a systematic Google search, described in Supplementary Note 1.

To facilitate the future use of our database in combination with the IEA Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Projects Database, we define our variables in line with the IEA’s database and filtered our project entries to meet the minimum project capacity of 0.1 Mt yr⁻¹. To facilitate the use of the database in combination with the IPCC AR6 Scenarios Database³², we align relevant variables with the AR6 scenario variables related to CCS. The resulting database is available in ref. ⁴³.