Abstract:China has put forward a carbon emission reduction target to reach CO₂ emission peak in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2060. It is vital for China to improve the development and commercialization scale of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, to achieve the carbon emission reduction target. According to the 14th Five-Year Plan, large-scale demonstration CCUS projects will be carried out in China. However, due to the low permeability and heterogeneity of most CO₂ storage formations in China, the capacity of CO₂ storage is limited, which cannot provide enough subsurface CO₂ storage space for the operation of large-scale CCUS projects. In this study, the concept of CO₂ storage intensity (the amount of CO₂ storage per unit area) was proposed to evaluate the CO₂ storage capacity of China’s ongoing CCUS projects as the key indicator. The CO₂ storage intensity indicator was calculated in both deep saline aquifer CO₂ storage and CO₂–EOR projects. The results showed that the CO₂ storage intensities of all the listed projects were lower than 10⁵ t/km², which was unable to meet the needs of China’s dual carbon target. To substantially improve the CO₂ storage intensity, a multi-layer coordinative injection and pumping technology was proposed in this study. This technology can substantially improve the CO₂ storage intensity by injecting CO₂ through multiple perforation tunnels and extracting saline water from multiple formations. The available pore spaces are increased and the formation pressure is optimized with this technology, which favors improvement of the CO₂ storage intensity. To validate the performance of this technology, a multi-layer CO₂ injection model was built by T2Well code for the numerical simulations of three different scenarios. CO₂ injection was set as a constant pressure process during the 60 days injection. By looking at the pressure and CO₂ saturation distributions, it was noted that the accumulation of pressure was reduced by the cooperation of injection and pumping, which decreased geomechanically instability. Based on the CO₂ saturation distribution maps, migration of CO₂ was driven by the pressure difference between the injection and pumping wells, which made the plume move toward the pumping wells. In addition, rock properties changed the shape and migration range of the plume during CO₂ injection. The CO₂ storage intensities were calculated under the three simulated conditions. Among them, the CO₂ storage intensity for the heterogeneous sandstone was the highest, which reached 1.115×10⁶ t/km². This value was far larger than China’s existing CCUS projects. In summary, the multi-layer injection and pumping technology can greatly increase the amount of CO₂ injection, which is beneficial for the conservation of land in China and promotes the deployment of large-scale CCUS projects in China.