A new annual record for carbon dioxide stored underground – 43.6 million tonnes sequestered in 2024 – was revealed last Monday with the publication of the 2026 Annual Report from The London Register of Subsurface CO₂ Storage.

Led by researchers from Imperial College London, the report tracks the annual rates of CO₂ stored by operational projects worldwide. In a news release which also stated that 421.7 million tonnes had been stored in the past three decades, the writers said that this year’s edition expands the Register to 70 projects across 17 countries on six continents.

According to Professor Samuel Krevor, Director of the Register from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial, “The consistency of these operations, and the fact that new countries and projects continue to join the Register, shows that geological storage is demonstrated as a large-scale mitigation technology.”

Findings from the report include that projects in the US remain the largest contributors by number, with 23 projects reporting a combined 20.2 million tonnes. Brazil’s Petrobras Santos Basin Pre-Salt Oil Field remained the single largest project, reporting 14.2 million tonnes (approximately one-third of the global total).

China’s reported storage increased to 1.7 million tonnes in 2024, driven primarily by the Shengli Oilfield and the newly included Daqing Aonan Oilfield, while Australia reported 1.7 million tonnes with the addition of the Moomba project. New Zealand and Italy both entered the Register for the first time, and in Europe the Northern Lights project in Norway began injection in August 2025.

The report alludes to significant revisions to previously published figures based on corrections to instances of double counting between company-level and project-level reporting. Says Professor Krevor, “To meet the 1.5°C target pledged by the Paris Agreement, all projections indicate that geological CO₂ storage must scale up to one billion tonnes of CO₂ storage or more per year by 2050. The more precisely we can trace every tonne of CO₂ from injection to permanent storage, the stronger the evidence base we can provide as the technology grows to the scale that climate targets demand.”

The consortium behind the Register brings together more than 30 international experts from academia, industry and government, including the Department of Energy Science & Engineering at Stanford, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Global CCS Institute, the Carbon Capture & Storage Association, IEAGHG and CSIRO.

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