Study Finds Carbon Capture and Natural Gas Can Power Data Center Grow…

A Rice University study finds that 34 US states have sufficient saline aquifer storage capacity to sequester over 100 years of projected data center CO₂ emissions beyond 2030, with the fastest data center growth regions (Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Illinois) overlapping substantially with carbon storage resources. Natural gas plants equipped with carbon capture can mitigate 90%+ of data centre emissions while meeting baseload power demand. If you're building AI infrastructure or selling to data centre operators, your power strategy is now a carbon capture play—and the geology to make it work sits under the exact eight states where you're competing for land. You need CO₂ pipelines to move captured emissions to storage; that's the next choke point.