This special podcast episode is sponsored by Equinoor and produced by Politico Studio.

Several rivers have burst their backs, destroying villages, washing away cars and leading to the

emergency level. In France and Spain, temperatures have reached record levels. Schools and offices have

been closed. Some cases the flames fanned by high winds were as tall as a three-story building.

Despite the news and the heat, the storms and the drought, the world is moving too slowly to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures.

Oil, gas and coal still made up 81.5% of the global energy mix in 2022, down just 3% from 2015 when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, looks like an increasingly important technology for achieving net zero.

Advocates believe that without CCS, which gathers emissions, processes them and stores them safely

underground, we simply won't meet our climate targets.

But the technology faces a range of obstacles.

Campaign groups believe CCS offers oil and gas companies a free pass to keep extracting and burning fossil fuels.

Others worry about the safety of stored CO2.

There are also practical constraints.

CCS technology, while proven, is expensive to install

and need subsidies and financial incentives

to encourage the industry to make the short-term capital investment needed.

I'm Adam Green, a science and technology writer.

In this podcast episode, I'll be talking to experts about the necessity of CCS, what's holding it back, and where it fits into the energy

transition. Ruth Herbert is CEO of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, a European

advocacy group. She talked to me about how CCS works.

One of the main methodologies is geological storage, so that is taking that CO2 and pumping it down under the seabed into rock formations.

This is what we're looking at in the UK offshore, but it can also be done onshore, and it's being looked at onshore in the US, for example.

There are other ways of permanently sequestering the carbon dioxide, so you can put that into

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