Feasibility of Carbon Dioxide Storage Resource Use within Climate Change Mitigation Scenarios for the United States

To progress decarbonization in the United States, numerous techno-economic models that project CO₂ storage deployment at annual injection rates of 0.3-1.7 Gt year^-1 by 2050 have been built. However, these models do not consider many geological, technical, or socio-economic factors that could impede the growth of geological storage resource use, and there is uncertainty about the feasibility of the resulting projections. Here, we evaluate storage scenarios across four major modeling efforts. We apply a growth modeling framework using logistic curves to analyze the feasibility of growth trajectories under constraints imposed by the associated storage resource availability. We show that storage resources are abundant, and resources of the Gulf Coast alone would be sufficient to meet national demand were it not for transport limitations. On the contrary, deployment trajectories require sustained average annual (exponential) growth at rates of >10% nationally for two of the three reports and between 3% and 20% regionally across four storage hubs projected in both reports with regional resolution. These rates are high relative to historical rates of growth in analogous large scale energy infrastructure in the United States. Projections for California appear to be particularly infeasible. Future modeling efforts should be constrained to more realistic deployment trajectories, which could be done with simple constraints from the type of modeling framework presented here.