Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is broadly recognised as having the potential to play a key role in meeting climate change targets, delivering low carbon heat and power, decarbonising industry and, more recently, its ability to facilitate the net removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere. However, despite this broad consensus and its technical maturity, CCS has not yet been deployed on a scale commensurate with the ambitions articulated a decade ago. Thus, in this paper we review the current state-of-the-art of CO₂ capture, transport, utilisation and storage from a multi-scale perspective, moving from the global to molecular scales. In light of the COP21 commitments to limit warming to less than 2 °C, we extend the remit of this study to include the key negative emissions technologies (NETs) of bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC). Cognisant of the non-technical barriers to deploying CCS, we reflect on recent experience from the UK's CCS commercialisation programme and consider the commercial and political barriers to the large-scale deployment of CCS. In all areas, we focus on identifying and clearly articulating the key research challenges that could usefully be addressed in the coming decade.

We report measurements of the diffusion coefficients of CO₂ and N₂ in pure water at temperatures between (298.15 and 423.15) K and pressures between (15 and 45) MPa. The measurements were made by the Taylor dispersion method and have a standard relative uncertainty of 2.3 %. The results were found to be essentially independent of pressure over the range investigated and a simple relation, based on the Stokes–Einstein equation, is proposed to correlate the experimental data. Some experimental difficulties arising in the measurement of the diffusivities of slightly soluble acid-gas solutes such as CO₂ in water are also discussed.

We report a new determination of the Universal Gas Constant R: (8.314 471 ±0.000 014) J·mol−1K−1. The uncertainty in the new value is 1.7 ppm (standard error), a factor of 5 smaller than the uncertainty in the best previous value. The gas constant was determined from measurements of the speed of sound in argon as a function of pressure at the temperature of the triple point of water. The speed of sound was measured with a spherical resonator whose volume was determined by weighing the mercury required to fill it at the temperature of the triple point. The molar mass of the argon was determined by comparing the speed of sound in it to the speed of sound in a standard sample of argon of accurately known chemical and isotoptic composition.