In order to limit global warming and avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change, the emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduceddrastically. 
 
Amongst the spectrum of measures that need to be urgently implemented to mitigate climate change and ocean acidification, CO2 Capture and Storage (CCS) can play a decisive role as it could contribute 20% of the CO2 reduction needed by 2050.

CCS involves capturing CO2 at coal- or gas-fired power stations and industrial facilities (steel mills, cement plants, refineries, etc.), transporting it by pipeline or ship to a storage location, and injecting it via a well into a suitable geological formation for long-term storage.
 
A comprehensive description of CO2 Geological Storage can be found in the CO2GeoNet brochure “What does CO2 Geological Storage really mean?” available in this website under Resources in 27 languages.
 
Major research programmes on CCS have been conducted in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan since the 1990’s. Much knowledge has already been acquired at the world’s first large-scale demonstration projects, where CO2 has been injected deep underground for several years: Sleipner in Norway (about 1 Mt/year since1996), Weyburn in Canada (about 1.8 Mt/year since 2000), and In Salah in Algeria (about 1 Mt/year since 2004). 
 
International collaboration on CO2 storage research, fostered by IEA-GHG and CSLF, at these and other sites has been particularly important in extending our understanding and developing a worldwide scientific community that is addressing this issue.