CCS is critical to industrial decarbonisation

Essential industries pose emission challenges

Heavy industries are essential to everyday life. The impact of cement, steel and chemical manufacturing is all around us: you couldn’t build cities (or most homes!) without them.

While many of these industries are critical for decarbonisation technology – wind turbines, for example, use both steel and concrete – they are notably hard-to-abate themselves. The chemical processes that drive cost-effective and efficient production offer few easy opportunities to reduce emissions.

As a proven technology offering large-scale emissions reduction, carbon capture and storage (CCS) can play a crucial role in cement, steel, chemicals (and other materials) being produced with a lower carbon intensity.

Clusters of these hard-to-abate industries exist throughout Asia, including in Japan, South Korea, China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

While no single technology provides a “silver bullet” for decarbonization, CCS is a vital part of a suite of technologies that must be scaled up significantly to achieve global climate targets.

For cement factories, such as this one in Thailand, CCS is the only practical way to deep emissions reductions.

A solution where others don’t exist

In its 2020 publication, CCUS In Clean Energy Transitions, the International Energy Agency laid out the case for carbon capture and storage to be an effective decarbonisation tool for heavy industry. While noting that such industry accounted for nearly 20% of global emissions, the IEA highlighted that cement production had no practical way to achieve deep emissions reductions without CCS.

The majority of emissions in cement manufacturing come, not from fossil fuels combustion, but from the chemistry of the process of creating “clinker” (the key active ingredient of Portland cement). These process emissions would persist even if kilns were electrified or fuelled by bioenergy. As the IEA stated:

“With no demonstrated alternative way of producing cement, capturing and permanently storing these CO2 emissions is effectively the only option.”

The IEA document also outlines a strong case for the deployment of CCS to produce low-carbon hydrogen that could be used as a reducing agent in steel manufacturing and a feedstock for chemical and fertiliser production. ”In most regions”, using CCS in the production of hydrogen from natural gas would be more cost-effective than using renewables-powered electrolysis of water.

According to the IEA, CCS technology could be retrofitted to existing industrial facilities or included in new builds. Development of shared CO2 capture and transport infrastructure at industrial hubs would improve the cost-effectiveness of CCS and make the technology more accessible to smaller operations.

CCS-based negative emissions technology such as bio energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air capture (DAC) can also play an important role for heavy industry.

Long-term benefits for heavy industry

Research from 2021, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified that CCS was an important technology for ensuring production by hard-to-abate industries was not unduly constrained on the pathway to global climate targets.

The paper – Hard-to-Abate Sectors: The role of industrial carbon capture and storage in emission mitigation – determined that without use of CCS, industrial production in 2100 would be limited to 1.6 times 2010 levels if global warming was to be kept to 2°C.

The research also found that CCS was a cost-effective long-term solution for decarbonisation of industry: “Without industrial CCS, the cost of reaching the 2°C target increased by 12% in 2075 and 71% in 2100 relative to the cost of achieving the policy with cryogenic carbon capture. “

Similarly, a paper published in 2024 by researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) and HKUST-Jiangmen Laboratory for Carbon Science, concluded that mature CCS technology was a promising solution for reducing emissions in otherwise challenged hard-to-abate sectors.

The study described the concept of CCS hubs as “a multifaceted solution that harmonises environmental responsibility with economic pragmatism, fostering a sustainable and collaborative approach to industrial decarbonisation.”

Industrial CCS facilities already emerging

The ability of CCS to decarbonise hard-to-abate industry is reflected by the nature of projects being developed around the world.

The Northern Lights project, which started in August 2025, will receive CO2 from a cement factory in Norway, a fertiliser plant in the Netherlands and eventually other European industrial customers.

The Global CCS Institute’s 2025 Status of CCS report details more than 20 operational projects specific to the chemical, steel and iron, cement, and hydrogen, ammonia and fertiliser industries. By 2030, the capture capacity of projects in chemicals, steel/iron and cement is expected to be close to what is operational across all industries today.

Of the industrial facilities currently operational, 10 are in China – eight in the chemical sector and two in cement.

Meanwhile, the nine CCS projects selected for advanced efforts for commercialisation by the Government of Japan will capture CO2 from wide-area emissions sources, with chemical, cement and steel companies among the participants.