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What is the opposite of oil drilling?

A growing industry aims to remove carbon from the atmosphere—but it’s still in its infancy, and greenhouse-gas emissions remain dangerously high.

He was astonished to learn that the U.S. is home to hundreds of thousands of disposal wells, which are routinely injected with waste—cheese whey, brine from meatpacking facilities, and, more commonly, byproducts of oil-and-gas drilling—that can’t feasibly be burned, recycled, or dumped in a landfill. Before oil, gas, and coal were extracted and burned, producing vast quantities of greenhouse gases, their gigatons of carbon had been trapped underground; by burying bio-oil in a disposal well, Charm might start to undo some of the harms of fossil fuels. As with garbage collection, Deich told me, “carbon removal delivers a service that I think we want as a society.” And, although trash has certainly made some entrepreneurs rich, its safe and permanent disposal ultimately depends on public funding.

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