Article Open access Aleh Cherp & Jessica Jewell Nature Climate Change (2024) Cite this article Metrics Abstract Climate change mitigation requires the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Recent plans indicate an eight-fold increase in CCS capacity by 2030, yet the feasibility of CCS expansion is debated. Using historical growth of CCS and other policy-driven technologies, we show that if plans double between 2023 and 2025 and their failure rates decrease by half, CCS could reach 0.37 GtCO 2 yr −1 by 2030—lower than most 1.5 °C pathways but higher than most 2 °C pathways. Staying on-track to 2 °C would require that in 2030–2040 CCS accelerates at least as fast as wind power did in the 2000s, and that after 2040, it grows faster than nuclear power did in the 1970s to 1980s. Only 10% of mitigation pathways meet these feasibility constraints, and virtually all of them depict <600 GtCO 2 captured and stored by 2100. Relaxing the constraints by assuming no failures of CCS plans and growth as fast as flue-gas desulfurization would approximately double this amount. Main Carbon capture and storage (CCS) plays a key role in climate mitigation pathways, yet its feasibility is vigorously debated 1 , 2 , 3 . The recent interest in CCS 4 , 5 , 6 , including negative emissions technologies—direct air capture (DACCS) and bioenergy with CCS (BECCS)—is reflected in plans to increase CCS capacity eight-fold from 2023 to 2030 7 . However, 10 years ago, a similar wave of CCS plans 5 largely failed 8 , 9 . Can the new push bring CCS on track 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 for the Paris climate targets? Answering this question requires overcoming three challenges. The first is anticipating how many CCS plans are likely to [...]