First complete record of global underground CO₂ storage released
Northern Lights is the world’s first cross-border CO₂ transport and storage facility, located in Øygarden, outside Bergen. The first volumes of CO₂ were successfully injected and stored in the reservoir in August 2025. Northern Lights JV is equally owned by Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell. The Norwegian government covered around 80% of the cost of phase 1 of the Northern Lights project. The Northern Lights Phase 2 expansion received €131 million from the EU Connecting Europe Facility for Energy (CEF Energy) funding program in June 2024. Credit: Torstein Lund Eik/Equinor
The first ever audited account of actual CO quantities2 stored underground by CCS projects around the world have been published. It was created by a new international consortium of scientists and industry partners, including NTNU.
The new collaboration’s first annual report, the London Register of Subsurface CO₂ Storage, reveals that more than 383 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been stored since 1996, the equivalent of 81,044,946 petrol cars driven for a year.
This mass storage is primarily the result of projects in the United States, China, Brazil, Australia and the Middle East, with continued growth expected in 2024-2025.
“The central message of our report is that CCS works, demonstrating proven capability and accelerating the dynamics of geological CO₂ storage,” said Professor Samuel Krevor, Registry Director and Professor of Underground Carbon Storage in the Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial.
“We found that industrial-scale carbon management is already a reality and can safely sequester CO₂ at depth, which will be a key strategy, alongside vital emissions reduction efforts, to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries and reduce total CO₂ in the atmosphere,” he said.
The report provides unequivocal evidence that technology is a critical tool for avoiding and removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, on the scale needed to combat climate change, the consortium said in a press release. He emphasizes that CCS is not a future concept, but a proven, scalable technology that works effectively today.
Documents actual progress
“There has been a lot of speculation about CCS over the past few decades, but here we document real progress,” said Philip Ringrose, professor of energy transition geosciences at NTNU and member of the consortium. “Global carbon storage has seen an annual growth rate of 17% since 1996, and by 2023 the storage rate was 45 million tonnes per year.”
Ringrose said NTNU is very pleased to have contributed to this new report, which is the first ever audited account of the actual amounts of CO₂ stored underground by CCS projects around the world.
“Carbon removal and storage clearly needs to continue to grow to support climate action plans, but now we can build on a solid foundation… Carbon in the ground! “, he said.
Trapped underground
CCS prevents CO₂ released by industrial processes and power plants from entering the atmosphere by separating it from other gases and injecting it underground (typically at depths of a kilometer or more), where it is permanently trapped in geological formations such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
It is essential for decarbonizing industrial sectors that cannot easily run on renewable electricity alone, such as iron and steel production, and is currently the only technology available to directly address emissions from these processes. International bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognize CCS as a crucial technology for achieving net zero emissions.
The London Register of Subsurface CO₂ Storage is an initiative that details the progress of CCS, from a single pioneering project in Norway in 1996 to what is now a global enterprise.
The Registry’s 2025 Annual Report tracked annual rates of CO₂ stored underground from operational projects around the world from 1996 to 2024. It compiled public information (such as government greenhouse gas reporting databases) and surveyed project operators in a coordinated effort to establish the first and most comprehensive record of CCS growth and maturation to date.
The study found that a total of 383 million tonnes of CO₂ have been stored by CCS since 1996.
Although opinions on CCS are polarized within the climate science community (some view it as a distraction from reducing carbon emissions, or as CCS is not well developed and has not been proven to be feasible to deploy at sufficient scale), CCS projects nonetheless underpin many national, international, and corporate decarbonization plans.
More information:
London Register of Underground CO₂ Storage. Imperialcollegelondon.github.i … Surface CO2 storage/
Provided by Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Quote: First comprehensive record of global underground CO₂ storage published (November 17, 2025) retrieved November 17, 2025 from https://phys.org/news/2025-11-global-underground-storage.html
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