The amount of carbon dioxide that can be stored underground is vastly overestimated, new research said Wednesday, challenging assumptions about the "limitless" potential this approach holds to reducing global warming.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is complex and costly, and critics say it cannot meet the urgent need to slash planet-heating emissions and meet the world's climate targets.

One approach works by avoiding emissions at a polluting source -- such as a factory smokestack. Another, known as direct air capture, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere.

But both require the CO2 captured to be injected into rock and locked away underground for centuries or millennia in deep geologic formations.

At present, carbon capture plays a vanishingly small part in addressing the climate crisis. But

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