CCS in Germany returns as study warns safeguards are weakening

CCS in Germany has moved back into the center of climate policy, and a new study says the safeguards around its use have grown weaker as political support has returned. The analysis, published in Environmental Politics, warns that looser rules could extend the life of fossil fuel infrastructure and draw attention from other climate measures.

The study was led by Tobias Haas of the Research Institute for Sustainability at the GFZ, according to the Research Institute for Sustainability Potsdam. Haas said Germany had long treated carbon capture and storage as politically off-limits, making its quick return to the climate debate a central question for researchers.

Why is CCS back in Germany?

According to the study, the shift began under Germany’s “traffic light” coalition government from 2021 to 2024. That government revised the Carbon Dioxide Storage Act, prepared a carbon management strategy and worked on a long-term plan for emissions considered unavoidable.

The researchers say the broader term “carbon management” helped change the politics around the technology. Instead of discussing CCS alone, policymakers grouped it with carbon capture and utilization, known as CCU, and carbon dioxide removal, or CDR.

CCS means capturing carbon dioxide from industrial or energy facilities and storing it underground rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. CCU uses captured carbon dioxide in products or processes, while CDR refers to methods that remove CO₂ already in the air.

Haas said the carbon management framing made CCS more acceptable because it placed the technology inside a wider policy package. The study argues that this reframing helped move the debate from whether CCS should be used to how broadly it should be allowed.

Study says limits were softened during the political process

At the start of the debate, the study says there was broad support for restricting CCS to emissions that could not be avoided for technical reasons. Avoiding emissions was still meant to come first.

The researchers say those conditions became less firm over time. In 2025, the current federal government passed an amendment to the Carbon Dioxide Storage Act that continues to focus on storage under the seabed, but relaxes earlier limits on where CCS may be used.

According to the study, the law bars only coal-fired power plants from using CCS. Those plants are already due to be shut down by 2038.

The authors also point to federal plans for 12 gigawatts of additional power plant capacity that is supposed to become climate-neutral by 2045 through “technology-neutral” approaches. In their view, that could leave room for CCS at new gas-fired power plants and keep Germany tied to fossil fuels for longer.

What safeguards do researchers want?

The study identifies three reasons the proposed limits did not hold. Environmental groups took different positions, weakening their combined influence; public debate paid less attention to the strict conditions many supporters had attached to CCS; and the rules were diluted during a long decision-making process.

The authors call for clear, binding criteria for when CCS can be used. They say Germany needs a firm definition of “hard-to-abate” emissions, meaning emissions that cannot be prevented with available technical options.

Haas warned that without such a definition, more emissions could later be labeled unavoidable, expanding the role of CCS. The researchers argue that the place of CCS in Germany’s climate policy is a political choice about how the country aims to reach climate neutrality, not only a technical or economic question.

The study also says the debate shows the risk of depending on technologies that have not yet delivered climate protection at scale. Its authors say Germany’s decisions on CCS will shape whether carbon management remains limited to residual emissions or becomes a wider tool for sustaining fossil-based systems.

This story draws on original reporting from Phys.org.