A U.N. report concluded carbon capture could offset fossil fuels’ effect on climate change. Two decades later, the process has failed to meaningfully scale up, and it’s proving hard to take the promises back.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.

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For many university faculty, the rewards for studying the industry’s favored climate solution have been numerous, opening opportunities, funding papers and raising their profiles. Benson is a clear example. When the IPCC was awarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work, she and her co-authors were recognized among the scientists who contributed. When Stanford University sought a new director for its ExxonMobil-funded climate research center, it tapped her. When President Joe Biden prioritized climate policy, he brought Benson into the White House.

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The record of the industry’s largest CCS sites — ones designed solely to help the climate — has been far more troubled.

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As proof that CCS is on the rise, she pointed to 77 operating CCS projects identified in a report by the industry group the Global CCS Institute and said that another report demonstrated a tenfold growth in CO2 injected underground since 2005.

When ProPublica and Drilled reviewed that same data, however, and excluded the enhanced oil recovery projects, we found just eight operating large-scale carbon burial projects on that list (10 using the group’s more recent data), and half the increase in annual injections that Benson stated.

Experts interviewed for this story insisted — often in an anguished timbre — that CCS simply must work because decades of delay have foreclosed other paths to a stable climatic future.

But just because the world now needs CCS to work doesn’t mean it can.

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“The fraction of CO2 retained underground is likely to be very high,” she told the board, again pointing to the 2005 special report: “This study said 99% over 1,000 years.”

The board set the ambitious goal of burying more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045, more than all the carbon that has ever been geologically stored around the world combined. Since it opened in May, the new project has injected just 7% of its advertised capacity, but California Resources Corp. is now seeking permits for eight more CCS projects across California, and other oil and gas companies have proposed four more, including two that Stanford is directly involved with.