What are the main business models in the CCUS market?
In our CCUS market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
The main business models in the CCUS market are capture technology and licensing, capture as a service, CO2 transport and storage, integrated hub services, CO2 utilisation, low-carbon products and carbon-removal credits. Today, transport and storage looks like the strongest standalone infrastructure model, while capture technology offers the cleanest scalable supplier model.
CCUS is already a commercial market, but the announced project pipeline greatly overstates the amount of business that is actually financeable. Operating capacity, final investment decisions and contracted volumes are much better measures than project announcements.
The most attractive economics are increasingly appearing at the bottlenecks rather than around the molecule itself. Scarce storage sites, pipelines, terminals and proven capture systems can earn repeat revenue, whereas simply owning captured CO2 does not create much pricing power.
Capture vendors have an appealing position because they can sell equipment, licences, engineering, solvents and maintenance without taking decades of geological liability. Capture-as-a-service could produce more recurring revenue, but it also pushes financing and operating risk back onto the provider.
Transport and storage becomes especially attractive once capacity is booked before construction. Northern Lights and Porthos show why long contracts and anchor customers can turn CCUS infrastructure into something that looks much closer to conventional energy infrastructure.
That also explains the rapid shift toward hubs. Sharing pipelines, ships and storage across several emitters lowers unit costs, but the model works best when one large customer provides enough initial volume to keep the network from becoming an expensive empty asset.
Oil and gas incumbents have a structural advantage in this part of the market. Existing pipelines, subsurface expertise, permitting experience, balance sheets and the ability to carry long-lived liabilities are difficult for a small specialist developer to reproduce.
CO2 utilisation is commercially real but is unlikely to become the universal outlet for captured carbon. Urea and enhanced oil recovery dominate today's volumes, while fuels, chemicals and mineralisation remain a collection of narrower markets with very different economics.
Low-carbon products may ultimately provide a more durable route to demand because the cost of capture can be embedded in products customers already buy, particularly cement, steel and ammonia. Carbon removal is different again: DAC and BECCS sell a verified negative tonne to buyers willing to pay far more than an industrial emitter normally would.
Government support is still central to the market, but the important question is what that support makes possible. The strongest CCUS businesses are beginning to use policy to unlock long-term contracts, infrastructure utilisation and repeatable products rather than treating subsidy itself as the business model.
This market map, featured in our CCUS market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the CCUS market
Is CCUS actually a commercial market now?
CCUS is commercially real today, but most announced projects still cannot get financed on ordinary market terms.
The latest Global CCS Institute review shows how quickly the physical market has moved. Operating CCS facilities rose from 50 to 77 in one year, while operating capture capacity increased from 51 million to 64 million tonnes a year. The full pipeline reached 513 million tonnes a year, up 23%. The IEA's latest financing work tells the same story from the capital side: annual CCUS investment passed $5 billion in 2025 after growing more than fifteen-fold since 2020, and more than 30 projects reached final investment decision over the previous two years.
The catch is visible in the same IEA dataset. Around 90% of projects announced for operation by 2035 still have no final investment decision. More than $15 billion of commercial debt has entered CCUS over the previous two years, but lenders have concentrated on a small number of projects where governments or long contracts remove the risks they dislike most.
We can already see real CCUS infrastructure getting financed, but only under fairly strict conditions. Industrial capture plants are operating, major U.S. storage contracts are being signed, and construction is moving ahead in several clusters. At the same time, an announcement still tells us very little about whether a project will actually be built. For investors, the useful dividing line today is FID and contracted revenue; the announced pipeline is still much too easy to inflate.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
What do CCUS companies actually sell?
CCUS companies currently make money from seven quite different products, which is why talking about one generic “CCUS business model” creates more confusion than clarity.
A capture-technology company can sell equipment, engineering, licences, solvents and maintenance. A service provider can bundle some of those pieces and charge over the life of the plant. A transport-and-storage operator sells pipeline, shipping, terminal and underground storage capacity. An integrated developer can take responsibility for several links in the chain and charge an emitter for a complete decarbonisation service.
Utilisation creates a separate revenue stream when captured CO2 is sold or converted into fuels, chemicals, fertiliser inputs or building materials. Industrial companies can also recover the cost of capture through a premium on a lower-carbon end product, as Heidelberg Materials is beginning to do with evoZero cement. Direct air capture and some bioenergy projects go one step further and sell verified carbon-removal credits.
We should also keep policy support separate from the operating model. A U.S. 45Q credit, a European carbon price or a UK contract can make one of these businesses financeable, but the company still needs an underlying product or service that somebody is paying for.
| CCUS business model | What the company sells | Typical customer | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capture technology and EPC | Equipment, process licences, engineering, solvents, maintenance | Industrial emitter | MHI, SLB Capturi |
| Carbon capture as a service | Long-term capture service, often including operations and maintenance | Industrial emitter | Carbon Clean-style CCaaS |
| CO2 transport and storage | Pipeline, shipping, terminal and geological storage capacity | Capture project or emitter | Northern Lights, Porthos |
| Integrated full-chain CCUS | Capture plus transport and storage under one commercial relationship | Industrial customer | ExxonMobil, large hub developers |
| CO2 utilisation | CO2 feedstock or products made with CO2 | Fertiliser, oil, fuel, chemical and materials buyers | Urea, EOR, synthetic fuels |
| Low-carbon product | Cement, steel, ammonia or another product with a lower carbon footprint | Ordinary industrial customer | Heidelberg Materials evoZero |
| Carbon removal | Verified tonnes of CO2 removed and stored | Corporate or government carbon buyers | 1PointFive, BECCS developers |
As this chart shows, and as featured in our CCUS market deck, search interest in carbon credits has grown significantly
Who actually pays for carbon capture and storage today?
In today's CCUS market, emitters pay most directly, but the money often comes from tax credits, carbon prices, regulated contracts, green-product buyers or carbon-removal buyers.
The United States gives us the clearest example of a policy-created revenue stream. Current IRS rules set the base 45Q amount at $17 per tonne for qualifying non-DAC facilities placed in service after July 4, 2025, with the credit rising fivefold when prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements are met. That can take the incentive to $85 per tonne. For a project capturing one million tonnes a year, the difference between having that revenue and having none is up to $85 million annually before operating performance and tax details.
Europe usually makes the emitter feel the carbon cost more directly. A cement, waste or chemicals plant that stores CO2 can avoid part of its exposure to emissions trading, while governments bridge the remaining gap when the carbon price is still too low. Porthos customers in Rotterdam, for example, have access to the Dutch SDE++ mechanism, which was designed so that public support falls as the economic value of avoided emissions rises.
There is also a growing end customer. Construction buyers can pay for lower-carbon cement, while companies such as Microsoft and Amazon buy durable removal credits. Those two transactions look similar from far away because both help finance carbon capture, but the customer is buying something very different: one buys a lower-carbon physical product, the other buys a verified tonne removed from the atmosphere.
These days, the customer rarely wants CO2 itself. The customer is paying to avoid a compliance cost, reduce the footprint of a product or claim a measured carbon removal.
Can a company make good money just selling carbon-capture technology?
Carbon-capture technology can already support a solid CCUS business, especially when the vendor stays away from long-term storage liability and adds service revenue around the equipment.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shows the traditional version. MHI says its KM CDR process has been delivered to 18 commercial plants, after more than three decades of development. The company earns through process design, licensing, engineering, equipment and support while leaving pipelines and storage reservoirs to other operators.
SLB Capturi is pushing the model toward standardised hardware. Its Just Catch units are being used across several European projects, including the Brevik cement plant, the Ørsted Kalundborg hub and Hafslund Celsio's Oslo waste-to-energy project. The Oslo contract covers a modular capture plant, liquefaction, temporary storage and loading infrastructure, with design capacity of about 350,000 tonnes a year. Standardisation matters commercially because every hour of engineering that can be reused across projects reduces the bespoke work that made first-generation capture plants so expensive.
Carbon Clean is trying to go further with Carbon Capture as a Service. Its model can bundle installation, solvents, maintenance, parts, compliance support and, in some versions, financing and coordination with transport and storage. For an industrial customer, paying for captured tonnes is much easier than learning to operate an unfamiliar chemical plant.
We have less confidence in CCaaS than in ordinary equipment and EPC revenue because the provider takes more capital and operating risk, while only a small number of mature projects have proved the returns. For now, the better business is selling the hardware, reusing the engineering and keeping the aftermarket revenue. If modular systems become repeat products instead of custom mega-projects, capture vendors can scale without owning the most capital-heavy part of the chain.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly VC funding for CCUS startups
Is CO2 transport and storage becoming the best CCUS business?
Right now, CO2 transport and storage looks like the strongest standalone CCUS business model because customers can sign long contracts for scarce infrastructure that can operate for decades.
Northern Lights is the best current proof. The first 1.5 million-tonne-per-year phase is operating and fully booked. Its owners, Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, have already sanctioned a second phase that will lift capacity to at least 5 million tonnes a year. That expansion followed a 15-year agreement with Stockholm Exergi for up to 900,000 tonnes a year, and the project also has commercial customers such as Yara and Ørsted alongside the government-backed Longship volumes.
Porthos reaches a similar result with a pipeline-based system. The Rotterdam project has contracted its full planned storage capacity of roughly 37 million tonnes, equal to around 2.5 million tonnes a year for 15 years. Its current schedule points to operation in the second half of 2027. Customers reserve transport and storage capacity before the system starts running, which gives lenders something concrete to underwrite.
The UK is making the infrastructure economics even more explicit. Under the Transport and Storage Regulatory Investment model, network users are meant to fund the allowed revenue of the operator, while the government provides last-resort support for exceptional shortfalls and high-impact risks. The latest 2026 policy updates continue to refine access and commercial rules around those networks.
The big risk is empty capacity. A pipeline or storage site has huge fixed costs, so returns deteriorate quickly if capture projects arrive late or disappear. That is why booked capacity, anchor customers and long contracts are so important. Once those pieces are in place, transport and storage starts to resemble regulated energy infrastructure more than a speculative climate-technology project.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Why is everyone building CCUS hubs now?
CCUS hubs are spreading quickly because shared pipelines, ships and storage sites spread huge fixed costs across several emitters.
The economics favor shared infrastructure almost immediately. A cement plant, refinery and waste facility sitting in the same industrial region do not each need a separate offshore storage reservoir. If they feed one network, every new customer improves utilisation of infrastructure that is already partly built.
Aramco's Jubail project makes the anchor-customer logic unusually clear. Phase one is designed for 9 million tonnes a year. Aramco expects about 6 million tonnes to come from its own facilities and another 3 million from neighboring industrial emitters. That gives the system a large internal base load while preserving room to sell capacity to outside customers.
Northern Lights shows what happens when a storage network sells to outside customers. Its first phase filled up, and the owners committed another NOK 7.5 billion to expand capacity to at least 5 million tonnes a year after signing Stockholm Exergi. The extra capacity can then be sold to several European emitters instead of being tied to one factory.
The hub pattern is still spreading. Japan has just moved six large industrial companies into design work for a ship-based CCS cluster around Mizushima, covering capture, liquefaction, temporary storage and shipping under a JOGMEC-backed program. That project is early, but the structure is telling: several emitters are being organised around common transport from the start.
Hubs also remove one of the biggest headaches in CCUS: each emitter no longer has to develop every link of the chain itself. The downside is coordination risk. A storage project can still end up underused if expected capture plants slip by several years. The best hub developers currently solve that problem by securing a large anchor volume first and adding merchant capacity around it.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows why CarbonCure stands out in CCUS
Do oil and gas companies have an unfair advantage in CCUS?
Oil and gas companies have a real structural advantage in CCUS transport and storage because they already know how to build pipelines, drill wells, model reservoirs and carry large subsurface liabilities.
ExxonMobil's Denbury acquisition is probably the cleanest demonstration. ExxonMobil paid $4.9 billion for a company that brought more than 1,300 miles of CO2 pipelines, including nearly 925 miles across Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. Those assets run through one of America's densest concentrations of industrial emissions, so the same network can connect several future capture customers to storage.
Exxon has already found customers for that network. A recent agreement with Williams became its seventh commercial CCS contract, while total contracted volume remains about 9 million tonnes a year. The portfolio now covers fertiliser, industrial gases, steel, gas processing, methanol, biopower and LNG-linked gas processing. The more interesting number here is seven customers, not one giant captive project: the network is starting to look genuinely multi-tenant.
Aramco brings another version of the advantage. Its Jubail joint venture combines Aramco's 60% stake with 20% each for Linde and SLB, pairing an energy company's balance sheet and subsurface position with industrial-gas and oilfield expertise.
Specialist startups can still win in solvents, membranes, modular capture equipment, measurement or software. Storage is harder to disrupt from a small balance sheet. The moat comes from geology, permits, pipelines, operating history and the ability to accept liabilities that can last for decades. In that part of CCUS, incumbent energy companies start several steps ahead.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Can companies really make money by selling captured CO2?
Selling captured CO2 is a real business, but today's utilisation market is far too concentrated to absorb the volumes that large-scale CCUS would create.
The IEA's widely used estimate puts global CO2 use at about 230 million tonnes a year. Roughly 130 million tonnes goes into urea production and another 70 to 80 million tonnes goes into enhanced oil recovery. Together, those two uses account for about 87% to 91% of the market. Food, beverages, greenhouses, metals and other uses split the small remainder.
That concentration tells us more than the headline volume. Urea often uses CO2 inside an integrated chemical process, while EOR has its own oil-production economics. Neither creates a broad merchant market where any capture project can simply find a buyer for millions of tonnes of CO2.
New uses could expand the opportunity. Synthetic fuels, chemicals and mineralised building materials can consume captured carbon, and some mineral products can keep that carbon locked away for a long time. Fuels are different because the CO2 is generally released again when the fuel is burned, even if the overall carbon cycle can still have climate value depending on the source and energy input.
We see utilisation as a collection of niche businesses with very different margins and carbon outcomes. EOR and urea are already large. Fuels and chemicals may grow. Mineralisation could become strategically interesting. None of those markets currently gives the wider CCUS industry a simple answer to the question “what do we do with all the captured CO2?”
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly funding for CCUS startups
Can low-carbon cement and other products pay for carbon capture?
Low-carbon products can pay for part of CCUS today, and cement is giving us the first serious test of whether customers will accept the extra cost.
Heidelberg Materials opened the Brevik capture facility in Norway in 2025, with expected capture of around 400,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, roughly half of the plant's emissions. The commercial test started when customers began receiving evoZero cement produced with carbon capture. Skanska has used the product for the new Skøyen metro station in Oslo, and Heidelberg Materials says Brevik and its planned Padeswood CCS project could together support around 1.4 million tonnes of evoZero production a year by 2030.
The customer already buys cement, which makes this model unusually practical. Heidelberg only needs contractors, developers and public buyers to value lower embodied carbon enough to pay a premium or require it in procurement.
The current economics are still tough. The IEA estimates that early commercial near-zero cement plants using CCS can have production costs around 75% to 150% above conventional plants, depending on the region. A voluntary green premium will struggle to cover that gap across the whole cement market.
Public procurement, embodied-carbon limits and carbon prices can change the equation. If governments or large developers specify lower-carbon concrete, the cost of CCS starts moving into an existing product market. That route looks much more durable than hoping every tonne of captured CO2 can be sold as a commodity.
Is carbon removal becoming a different CCUS business?
Carbon removal is already becoming a different CCUS business because buyers pay for a verified negative tonne, which can support prices far above ordinary point-source capture.
1PointFive's STRATOS project shows how the model works. The facility is designed to reach up to 500,000 tonnes of direct-air-capture capacity a year when fully commissioned. Microsoft agreed to buy 500,000 tonnes of DAC removal credits over six years, while Amazon agreed to buy 250,000 tonnes over ten years. 1PointFive has also disclosed deals with companies such as AT&T, TD and ANA.
Long contracts are especially valuable in DAC because the cost base is still extreme. The IEA currently estimates direct-air-capture projects at roughly $500 to $1,900 per tonne removed. Current BECCS can be much cheaper, with recent IEA estimates ranging from about $40 to $50 per tonne in high-concentration biorefinery applications to roughly $95 to $120 for more dilute heat, power, pulp and paper sources.
Those numbers create a very different market from conventional industrial CCS. A refinery trying to reduce regulated emissions will rarely volunteer to pay $1,000 for every tonne. A corporate buyer with a carbon-negative commitment may pay several hundred dollars for a smaller number of durable, measurable removals.
We treat carbon removal as a premium product category inside the wider CCUS ecosystem. The customer, pricing and value proposition are different enough that DAC economics tell us little about the economics of capturing CO2 from a cement kiln or gas-processing plant.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, compares the main business model options for carbon capture project developers
Which CCUS projects already make economic sense?
CCUS already makes the most economic sense where CO2 comes out in a concentrated stream, while cement, power and direct air capture need much stronger revenue support.
The chemistry drives a lot of the gap. Older but still useful IEA benchmarks put capture from high-purity industrial streams such as ethanol production and natural-gas processing at roughly $15 to $25 per tonne. More dilute sources such as cement and power have historically sat around $40 to $120 per tonne or higher, depending on energy prices, plant design and integration. Capture itself can account for roughly three-quarters of total CCUS cost in many applications.
Recent project economics show why those ranges still matter. U.S. tax support of up to $85 per tonne can make a high-purity project look quite attractive before transport and storage, while the same incentive may leave a difficult cement or power project with a sizeable gap. The IEA's newer cement work estimates total production costs for early near-zero cement plants using CCS at 75% to 150% above conventional production.
Direct air capture sits at the far end of the curve. Current IEA estimates of roughly $500 to $1,900 per removed tonne explain why DAC developers target premium carbon-removal buyers and public support instead of competing for the same customer as a normal industrial capture plant.
There is no useful “average CCUS cost.” A project attached to a highly concentrated industrial stream can have economics several times better than a project treating dilute flue gas, and DAC can sit another order of magnitude above that.
| CCUS application | Indicative current or established cost evidence | What usually makes it bankable |
|---|---|---|
| High-purity industrial capture | About $15-$25/t capture in established IEA benchmarks | Tax credit, carbon price, low transport/storage cost |
| Cement and other dilute industrial capture | Often about $40-$120+/t capture; early near-zero cement production can cost 75%-150% more | Carbon price, government contract, product premium |
| BECCS | About $40-$50/t in some biorefineries; roughly $95-$120/t for more dilute sources | Carbon-removal revenue plus energy/product revenue |
| Direct air capture | Roughly $500-$1,900/t removed for current projects | Premium CDR offtake, tax support and public funding |
Why do so many CCUS projects still die before construction?
Most CCUS projects that stall before construction fail because the contracts cannot allocate cross-chain risk cleanly enough for investors and lenders.
The IEA's latest financing review is brutal on this point: around 90% of announced projects targeting operation by 2035 have yet to reach FID. That gap is much larger than the industry's headline project pipeline suggests.
Denmark gave us a useful real-world stress test. Around 80% of industrial bidders withdrew from a recent CCS auction after developers struggled with transport, storage and other cross-chain risks. The government could offer support for capture, yet companies still had exposure to parts of the system they could not control.
A very recent BKV filing shows the same problem from the developer side. BKV says many of the CCUS projects behind its future sequestration targets still lack external financing, FID or definitive agreements, while the company estimates roughly $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion of investment would be needed through 2030. BKV expects much of that capital to come from third parties, which makes the financing chain part of the project risk rather than an afterthought.
The same problem can appear in reverse. Storage developers need confidence that enough capture projects will arrive to fill their infrastructure. The IEA has warned that storage capacity is advancing faster than committed capture volumes in some markets. A reservoir can be technically excellent and still produce poor returns if the pipelines feeding it stay half empty.
This is why FID has become a more useful measure than announced capacity. A bankable CCUS project needs a capture plant, transport route, storage site, permits, liability framework, carbon revenue and contracts that survive delays elsewhere in the chain. Missing one piece can stop a billion-dollar project even when the capture technology itself works perfectly well.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
This chart, featured in our CCUS market deck, illustrates revenue distribution by customer segment in the CCUS market
How different are CCUS business models in Europe, North America and the Middle East?
CCUS business models differ a lot by region today because Europe, North America and the Middle East have built three different ways of paying for the same underlying carbon infrastructure.
Europe is leaning hardest into networks, carbon prices and long-term public-private contracts. Norway has used public funding to get cross-border storage moving, the Netherlands uses SDE++ to bridge project economics, and the UK has built separate commercial frameworks for industrial capture, power and transport-and-storage networks. The UK government's latest 2026 updates are still refining network access rules, so European projects remain closely tied to policy design and long-term contracts.
North America relies more heavily on tax incentives and direct commercial contracts. As discussed above, 45Q gives qualifying captured tonnes a federal value in the United States, while companies such as ExxonMobil sign directly with industrial customers for transport and storage. DAC developers add another layer by selling premium removal credits to corporate buyers.
The Middle East is using larger integrated balance sheets. As discussed earlier, Aramco can anchor most of Jubail's first 9 million tonnes a year with its own facilities, then connect neighboring industrial emitters. That reduces the chicken-and-egg problem that appears when an independent storage developer has to wait for many unrelated customers to reach FID at the same time.
Every region still needs some public support. The difference is how that support reaches the project: Europe is building regulated networks, North America is turning tax credits into contractable cash flow, and Gulf producers can use internal emissions as anchor volumes. Those differences will probably remain important because geology, industrial concentration and carbon policy vary too much for one global model to dominate.
Can CCUS ever work without government support?
Some CCUS businesses can eventually work with much less government support, but a subsidy-free CCUS market is still nowhere close today.
The scale of support remains large. The IEA says governments earmarked more than $50 billion for CCUS over the three years covered by its latest financing work. At the same time, more than $15 billion of commercial debt was raised over the previous two years. Those two numbers belong together: private lenders have been willing to enter when public policy, long contracts or regulated frameworks make future cash flows predictable.
Support should fall first where the underlying business gets stronger with scale. A storage network can rely more on user fees once enough customers fill it. A capture vendor can sell standardised equipment into many projects without depending on one country's subsidy. A low-carbon cement producer can recover more of the cost from customers if procurement rules create real demand. A high-purity capture project may need only a modest carbon value because its technical cost starts lower.
Cement, power and DAC have a harder road. Current cost gaps are still too large in many locations for an ordinary customer to absorb them voluntarily. The same pattern shows up in recent project finance: lenders have concentrated on markets where governments absorb specific revenue, cross-chain or liability risks that private investors would otherwise price very heavily.
CCUS can become less policy-dependent as networks fill, equipment standardises and low-carbon products find buyers. A completely subsidy-free global CCUS market looks premature today. We should watch one number over time: support per tonne. If that falls as projects get repeated, the industry is learning; if it does not, taxpayers are still carrying the same economics.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows how carbon removal marketplace technology has evolved over time
What are the main business models in the CCUS market?
The main CCUS business models today are capture technology, capture-as-a-service, CO2 transport and storage, integrated hub services, CO2 utilisation, low-carbon products and carbon removal, with transport and storage currently looking like the strongest standalone infrastructure model.
Capture technology is the cleanest supplier business. Vendors can sell equipment, licences, engineering, solvents and maintenance across many projects while leaving pipelines and long-term storage liability to somebody else. Modularisation could make this model much better if more of the engineering becomes reusable.
Transport and storage has stronger infrastructure economics. Customers reserve capacity for years, the assets are scarce, and one network can serve several emitters. Northern Lights has already moved from a planned network to an operating, fully booked first phase, which is much stronger evidence than another project announcement.
Integrated hubs let one company capture more of the value chain, but they favor businesses with large balance sheets, pipelines and subsurface expertise. Capture-as-a-service can also create recurring revenue and make adoption easier for industrial customers, although its commercial track record is still thinner than equipment sales or contracted storage.
Utilisation works best as several specialised markets. Urea and EOR already dominate commercial CO2 use, while fuels, chemicals and mineralisation could add demand. Selling the molecule alone still looks too narrow to carry the wider CCUS market.
Low-carbon products offer a more interesting route because the carbon cost can move into cement, steel, ammonia or another product customers already buy. Carbon removal sits at the expensive end, where DAC and BECCS developers sell high-value removal credits under long contracts to buyers willing to pay for durable negative emissions.
As of now, CCUS is settling into an infrastructure-and-industrial-services market. The best-positioned companies control one of three scarce things: repeatable capture technology, access to transport and storage, or long-term customers willing to pay for lower-carbon products or verified removals. A clever capture process on its own is no longer enough, and a plan built around finding buyers for enormous volumes of CO2 is too weak to support the whole industry.
| Business model | Recurring revenue potential | Capital intensity | Current policy dependence | Our view today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capture technology / licensing | Medium-high | Low-medium | Indirect | Strong scalable supplier model |
| Capture as a service | High if contracts perform | Medium-high | High | Promising, still early |
| Transport and storage | High once capacity is booked | Very high | Medium-high at build-out | Strongest standalone infrastructure model |
| Integrated hub services | High | Very high | Medium-high | Strong for large incumbents |
| CO2 utilisation | Varies widely | Varies | Low-high | Attractive niches, weak universal model |
| Low-carbon products | Potentially high | Embedded in industrial capex | Medium-high today | Important route toward real end-market demand |
| Carbon removal credits | High with long offtake | Very high | Very high | Premium growth market, expensive today |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether CCUS has become a genuinely commercial market and which business models are proving most durable. We broke the market into separate commercial dimensions rather than relying on one headline measure: financing, paying customers, capture technology, transport and storage, utilisation, low-carbon products, carbon removal, project economics, infrastructure development and regional market structures.
Within each area, we gave the most weight to evidence of actual commercial commitment: projects reaching final investment decision, capital being committed, operating infrastructure, contracted capacity, long-term customer agreements, products reaching buyers and projects being cancelled or redesigned when the economics did not work. Announced capacity and long-term targets are useful context, but we do not treat an announcement as evidence that a project is financeable.
We also keep policy support separate from the underlying business model. Tax credits, carbon prices, regulated contracts and public funding can make a project bankable, but the commercial question remains what the company sells, who pays for it, how recurring the revenue can become and which risks remain on the company's balance sheet.
Cost comparisons are treated application by application rather than as one average CCUS cost. High-purity industrial capture, cement, power, BECCS and direct air capture have very different starting economics, so figures are used to show the shape of the cost curve rather than to imply that every project should fall inside one universal range.
The final judgments come from comparing the consistency of the evidence across these dimensions rather than from a mechanical scoring system. A single large project can show that a model is possible; operating assets, repeat contracts and several projects using similar commercial structures provide much stronger evidence that the model is becoming repeatable.
Key sources used for this analysis include the Global CCS Institute's Global Status of CCS 2025, the International Energy Agency's Financing CCUS at Scale, U.S. Internal Revenue Service guidance on Section 45Q, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on commercial capture deployments, SLB Capturi on modular capture projects, Northern Lights on commercial storage capacity, Porthos on its Rotterdam transport and storage project, ExxonMobil on the Denbury CO2 pipeline network, Heidelberg Materials on Brevik CCS and evoZero, 1PointFive on commercial DAC removal agreements, the IEA's work on DAC and BECCS costs, and JOGMEC material on advanced CCS projects in Japan.
In our CCUS market deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
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