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Abstract

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) play a central role in climate policy by producing the climate change mitigation pathways used by governments and the IPCC. Many pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C depend on significant expansion of CO2 geological storage often reaching around 15 GtCO2 per year by 2100. However, questions have arisen about the near to mid-term feasibility of these projected growth rates, particularly as global storage rates were only around 0.045 GtCO2 per year in 2023. We assessed how six major IAMs currently represent geological storage and examined whether recent improvements have strengthened the realism of projected deployment pathways. This research brief distils the key messages of the open access publication.