Carbon capture and storage is a licensing and geology question long before it is an engineering one. The CO₂ storage map shows the licensed estate and the geology underneath it.

The licensed estate

27 carbon storage licences, four defined storage sites, four storage complexes and 28 areas offered for application. The nesting matters: a licence is a right to explore an area, a complex is the geological structure being considered, and a site is the part actually permitted to take CO₂.

The candidate stores

478 offshore hydrocarbon fields and 61 onshore ones. A depleted field is the obvious candidate for storage — the geology is proven to have held buoyant fluid for geological time, and it is unusually well characterised because someone has already drilled it.

938 relinquishment opportunities and 2,438 BGS relinquishment prospects sit alongside, marking acreage handed back and available.

Why this is almost entirely offshore

Onshore CO₂ storage is not part of current UK policy, and the map reflects that rather than arguing with it. What is onshore here is the petroleum licensing estate — 75 licences and 193 licence blocks — which is a different activity that happens to share a regulator.

Capture plant and pipeline corridors, the part of CCUS that touches land and communities, are not open data. Their absence from this map is an absence of publication, not an absence of plans.

Sources

North Sea Transition Authority — carbon storage licences, sites, complexes, areas offered for application and offshore hydrocarbon fields — under the NSTA Open User Licence, with British Geological Survey relinquishment prospects.