Sustainability Concern|Exceeding Prudent Limit For Geological Carbon Storage
Why this criterion? This criterion flags scenarios that rely on an amount of geological carbon storage that exceeds estimated storage potentials.
This is a concern, because relying on an exceedance of physical storage potentials is unsustainable.
Why this threshold? We use geological carbon storage volumes that exceed prudent technical and sustainability limits as upper bounds on cumulative CCS as quantified by Gidden (2025).
Based on this study, we assume the following global thresholds for cumulative geological carbon storage in the period 2020–2100:
• Upper threshold, high concern: 1,460 Gt CO₂, which was identified as the median of the range by Gidden (2025) when combining spatial risk layers.
• Upper threshold, medium concern: 1,290 Gt CO₂, which was identified as the lower bound of the range by Gidden (2025) when combining spatial risk layers.
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Sources
| Identifier | Bibliographic information | Links |
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Matthew J. Gidden, Siddharth Joshi, John J. Armitage, Alina-Berenice Christ, Miranda Boettcher, Elina Brutschin, Alexandre C. Köberle, Keywan Riahi, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, and Joeri Rogelj. A prudent planetary limit for geologic carbon storage. Nature, 645(8079):124–132, September 2025. | DOI |