Xu et al. (2026): Integrating vision transformers with multi-criteria analysis for direct air capture and CO₂ storage (DACCS) siting

Yifan Xu, Mrityunjay Singh, Cornelia Schmidt-Hattenberger, Marton Pal Farkas and Tomas Fernandez-Steeger, IN:Carbon Capture Science & Technology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccst.2026.100647

Direct air capture with geological storage (DACCS) is a promising carbon dioxide removal pathway, but siting remains a multi-dimensional planning problem spanning energy supply, CO₂ transport and storage, environmental constraints, and social and regulatory feasibility. Existing DACCS siting studies either rely on region-specific GIS-MCDA workflows that are costly to rebuild and difficult to transfer across regions, or require deployment-derived labels that are scarce due to limited large-scale DACCS deployment. Here the authors introduce a hybrid, transparent siting framework that couples a PESTLE-grounded (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis with an earth-observation surrogate model. Using the North German Basin and the German North Sea as a case study, they (1) operationalize PESTLE dimensions into spatially explicit exclusion masks and opportunity layers for both onshore and offshore siting and generate high-resolution reference suitability maps, and (2) train a deep regression model that predicts suitability directly from globally available Sentinel-2 imagery.

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