Yuting Zhang, Christopher Aiden-Lee Jackson , Nihal Darraj, Sam Krevor

To progress decarbonisation in the United States, numerous techno-economic models have been built projecting climate change mitigation scenarios that include CO2 storage deployment at annual injection rates of 0.3 – 1.7 Gt yr-1 by 2050. However, these projections do not include geological, technical, or socio-economic factors that could impede the growth of geological storage resource use. Here, we apply a growth modelling framework to evaluate CO2 storage scenarios proposed in the Net Zero America, Carbon Neutral Pathways, Long-Term Strategy, and Decarb America reports. Our modelling framework uses logistic curves to analyse the feasibility of growth trajectories under constraints imposed by the associated storage resource availability. We show that the entire storage demand for the US can be accommodated by the resources available in the Gulf Coast alone. Deployment trajectories require sustained average annual (exponential) growth at rates >10% nationally and between 3% - 20% regionally across four storage hubs. These scale-up rates are high relative to those characterising analogous, historical, large-scale energy infrastructure projects in the US (4%), suggesting that modelled projections in current reports are too aggressive in their deployment of CCS. These models could be easily constrained to more realistic deployment trajectories with the type of modelling framework we present here.