Is the CCUS Market growing now?
In our CCUS market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Is the CCUS Market growing now? Yes. CCUS has moved into a real infrastructure build-out, with more operating capacity, construction, final investment decisions, storage infrastructure and capital committed than a few years ago.
The headline project pipeline still exaggerates the size of the market. Around 90% of projects announced for operation by 2035 have not reached final investment decision, so announced capacity should be heavily discounted.
The strongest evidence sits much closer to the ground. The latest Global CCS Institute count shows 77 commercial facilities operating and 47 under construction, with about 64 Mtpa of operating capture capacity and another 44 Mtpa being built.
Project count is growing faster than physical capture capacity. That suggests CCUS is spreading into more industrial applications and smaller projects rather than simply adding another generation of giant gas-processing facilities.
Money is moving even faster than capacity. Annual CCUS investment exceeded $5 billion in 2025, more than fifteen times its 2020 level, while more than $15 billion of commercial debt was raised over the previous two years.
Storage may be the most important structural shift. Shared transport and storage networks are turning CO2 disposal into infrastructure that multiple industrial customers can buy as a service, instead of forcing each capture project to build a complete system of its own.
Cement is becoming the clearest proof that CCUS can move into genuinely hard-to-abate industry. Brevik is operating at industrial scale, while the larger Padeswood project has reached FID and implementation.
Growth remains highly dependent on policy. The UK, EU and US all show that projects become financeable when tax credits, long-term contracts, public funding or regulated revenue models remove enough of the risk. Where that chain breaks, projects still disappear quickly.
The market is also becoming more selective. Lower-cost capture, storage and shared infrastructure are progressing faster, while hydrogen and some power projects continue to struggle with expensive capture, weak offtake and delayed transport infrastructure.
Europe currently has the strongest evidence of a connected CCUS market taking shape, especially around the North Sea. Australia is adding real operating storage volumes, and China's new 2030 injection target gives Asia-Pacific another meaningful deployment anchor.
The biggest reality check is scale. Roughly 64 Mtpa of operating capture capacity is only about 0.17% of annual global energy-related CO2 emissions, and nameplate capacity is higher than the tonnes actually captured and permanently stored.
CCUS is therefore already large enough to support a genuine industrial market, but nowhere near large enough to transform global emissions on its own. Construction, financing and storage are accelerating first; captured tonnes are following more slowly.
This market map, featured in our CCUS market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the CCUS market
Is the CCUS market actually growing, or are we just seeing more announcements?
The CCUS market is genuinely growing now, although announced projects still make the industry look much larger than the part that has actually been financed and built.
The gap is unusually large. The IEA's latest CCUS database tracks around 425 million tonnes per year of potential capture capacity targeting operation by 2035, yet its 2026 financing review found that roughly 90% of projects announced for that year have still not reached final investment decision. Counting every announced project would give us a badly inflated picture of the market.
The harder numbers point in the same direction, but at a more believable scale. The IEA found that capture capacity already operating or under construction increased by more than 10% between its two latest annual database updates, while storage capacity increased by around 25%. More than 30 projects reached final investment decision over the previous two years. Annual CCUS investment also climbed above $5 billion in 2025 after increasing more than fifteenfold since 2020.
So when we say the CCUS market is growing, we are mainly talking about more operating capacity, more projects entering construction, more money being committed and a much larger CO2 storage network. Actual tonnes captured are growing more slowly.
| What we should measure | Latest evidence | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Operating capacity | Global operating capture capacity reached about 64 Mtpa in the Global CCS Institute's latest annual count | Real deployment is increasing |
| Construction | 47 projects representing about 44 Mtpa were under construction | A sizeable next wave is already committed |
| Investment | Annual CCUS investment exceeded $5 billion in 2025 | Capital spending has accelerated sharply |
| Storage | Operating and under-construction capacity rose around 25% in the IEA's latest comparison | Storage infrastructure is growing especially fast |
| Announced projects | Roughly 90% of projects announced for 2035 have yet to reach FID | The headline pipeline is still highly speculative |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Are more CCUS projects actually operating, and is capture capacity keeping up?
Yes. Substantially more CCUS projects are operating now, although physical capture capacity is growing much more slowly than the project count.
The Global CCS Institute counted 77 commercial CCS facilities in operation in its latest annual status report, compared with 50 one year earlier. That is a 54% increase in a single year.
Capture capacity grew from about 51 million tonnes per year to 64 million tonnes per year, a 25% increase. The difference between those two growth rates tells us something useful: a lot of the newer operating projects are smaller than the older generation of giant gas-processing CCS facilities.
We can see that directly by dividing capacity by project count. Average operating capacity fell from roughly 1.0 million tonnes per project to about 0.83 million tonnes. CCUS is spreading into more industrial applications rather than simply adding another handful of multi-million-tonne gas projects.
That broadening is visible on the ground. Heidelberg Materials started industrial-scale capture at its Brevik cement plant. Northern Lights began receiving and storing CO2 from third parties. Santos' Moomba operation in Australia has moved through its first million tonnes of injected CO2. New facilities have also appeared in chemicals, hydrogen, ethanol and power.
The gap becomes even clearer when we compare CCUS with global emissions. The roughly 64 Mtpa of operating capture capacity in the Institute's 2025 snapshot represented only about 0.17% of the nearly 38.4 billion tonnes of global energy-related CO2 emissions reported by the IEA for the same year. And 64 Mtpa is nameplate capacity, not the amount that was necessarily captured and permanently stored.
New facilities also need time to ramp. Northern Lights, for example, began operating with 1.5 Mtpa of storage capacity before its customer volumes had fully arrived. Moomba shows the other side of that ramp-up: Santos reported that the project had already stored 2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent after just over 18 months.
Project count still overstates how quickly physical capture is growing, but both are moving upward.
| Global commercial CCS | Previous annual count | Latest annual count | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating facilities | 50 | 77 | +54% |
| Operating capture capacity | 51 Mtpa | 64 Mtpa | +25% |
| Approx. capacity per facility | 1.02 Mtpa | 0.83 Mtpa | -19% |
As this chart shows, and as featured in our CCUS market deck, search interest in carbon credits has grown significantly
Are CCUS projects finally making it into construction?
Yes. CCUS has a much larger group of projects under construction now, which gives us far more confidence than the hundreds of projects still sitting in development databases.
The Global CCS Institute counted 47 commercial projects under construction in its latest annual report. Together they represented around 44 Mtpa of additional capture capacity. Against 64 Mtpa already operating, completing that construction cohort would add capacity equivalent to roughly 69% of the existing operating base.
The IEA's 2026 financing work reaches a similar conclusion from a different dataset. More than 30 CCUS projects reached final investment decision over the previous two years, spanning capture, transport, storage, industry and power. Its project database suggests that projects already under construction could push operating capture capacity close to twice its current level by 2030.
Several of those projects are unusually concrete. The UK's Net Zero Teesside and Northern Endurance Partnership reached financial close and moved into execution. HyNet's transport and storage network followed. Heidelberg Materials took FID on its Padeswood cement capture plant, designed to capture around 800,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
Those projects can still run late. Porthos in the Netherlands shows how messy construction can be: pipelines have been laid, injection wells converted and compressor-station work is advanced, yet the project recently pushed expected operation into the second half of 2027 because several interdependent parts were taking longer than expected.
There is now enough steel in the ground, financing closed and construction underway to call the build-out real.
Is real money flowing into CCUS now?
Yes, much more money is flowing into CCUS today, and financing has accelerated far faster than operating capture capacity.
According to the IEA's 2026 financing review, annual CCUS investment exceeded $5 billion in 2025. That was more than fifteen times the level recorded in 2020.
The increase is starting to show up in debt markets as well. More than $15 billion of commercial debt was raised for CCUS projects during the previous two years, mainly through a handful of large transactions in Europe and North America. Project finance is particularly important here because it allows a transport network or storage business to raise capital around its own contracted revenues instead of relying entirely on the balance sheet of an oil major or industrial company.
The scale still needs perspective. Five billion dollars a year is tiny beside annual investment in renewable power, electricity grids, oil and gas or data centers.
But CCUS has clearly moved from a sub-billion-dollar investment category into a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure market.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly VC funding for CCUS startups
Can the CCUS market grow without huge government support?
Not at its current speed. Private money is entering CCUS, but governments are still taking on a large share of the risks that make major projects difficult to finance.
The numbers are hard to ignore. The IEA estimates that governments earmarked more than $50 billion for CCUS over the previous three years. Meanwhile, commercial debt has concentrated heavily in the countries where governments created long-term revenue guarantees, tax credits or explicit risk-sharing mechanisms.
The UK is the clearest example. Its government committed up to £21.7 billion over 25 years to the first CCUS clusters. Those structures helped the East Coast Cluster and HyNet reach financial close, and the IEA calculates that the UK accounted for around 85% of worldwide commercial CCUS debt raised during the previous two years.
The experiment looks very different when the contractual chain does not work. In a recent Danish support auction, around 80% of industrial bidders withdrew after developers struggled to manage risks between capture plants, transport providers and storage operators.
Captured CO2 usually has little value on its own, so someone has to pay for avoiding or storing each tonne through a carbon price, tax credit, government contract, regulated charge, low-carbon product premium or carbon-removal purchase.
For now, removing that support would kill a meaningful share of today's pipeline. There isn't much evidence to argue otherwise.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Is CO2 storage turning into a real market of its own?
Yes. CO2 storage is currently one of the fastest-growing and most commercially interesting parts of CCUS because emitters are starting to buy transport and storage as a service.
The IEA's latest annual comparison found operating and under-construction storage capacity up around 25%, more than twice the growth rate of capture capacity in the same comparison. Developers are effectively building parts of the downstream infrastructure ahead of some of the capture plants that will eventually feed it.
Northern Lights shows what this new market looks like. Its first phase provides 1.5 Mtpa of transport and storage capacity in Norway. Phase 2 is already under construction and will lift that to more than 5 Mtpa by 2028. Five industrial emitters across Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands have secured long-term agreements, and the project's dedicated CO2 shipping fleet is planned to grow from four vessels to eight.
Stockholm Exergi alone agreed to send as much as 900,000 tonnes of biogenic CO2 per year for 15 years. Yara, Ørsted, Heidelberg Materials and Hafslund Celsio give the network customers across fertilizer, energy, cement and waste.
The EU is pushing in the same direction. Under the Net-Zero Industry Act, the bloc wants at least 50 Mtpa of CO2 injection capacity by 2030. The European Commission's latest progress report counted three permitted storage sites, another seven in the permitting process and more than 19 Mtpa of capacity expected to become available over the next few years. Four new permits were awarded in roughly one year after Europe had issued only one permit between the 2009 CCS Directive and the creation of the new 2030 target.
Storage is increasingly becoming infrastructure that serves several emitters. The next problem for some developers may actually be finding enough CO2 customers to fill it.
| Storage development | Current evidence | Why it is important |
|---|---|---|
| Northern Lights | Expanding from 1.5 Mtpa to more than 5 Mtpa | Third-party storage is becoming a commercial service |
| EU storage market | 3 sites permitted, 7 more in permitting | The project pipeline is moving into regulation and development |
| EU 2030 target | At least 50 Mtpa injection capacity | Europe is deliberately creating storage ahead of future capture demand |
| Commercial customers | Cement, fertilizer, waste, bioenergy and energy companies have signed storage agreements | Demand is spreading across industries |
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows why CarbonCure stands out in CCUS
Is cement finally proving that CCUS can work in hard-to-abate industry?
Yes, cement has become one of the most convincing examples of CCUS moving beyond easier industrial applications, although the economics still rely heavily on public support.
Cement is a particularly useful test because a large share of its CO2 comes from the chemical reaction that turns limestone into clinker. Switching the plant to renewable electricity cannot remove those process emissions.
Heidelberg Materials' Brevik facility is now giving us an industrial-scale answer. The Norwegian plant was inaugurated in 2025 with the capacity to capture roughly 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, around half of the site's emissions. Captured CO2 is shipped to permanent offshore storage, and Heidelberg has already begun selling its carbon-captured evoZero cement into European construction projects.
The company's next plant is twice the size. Padeswood in the UK has entered implementation after its funding agreement and final investment decision. It is designed to capture about 800,000 tonnes annually, close to the plant's total emissions, with operation targeted for 2029.
That progression is more interesting than another demonstration announcement. One large cement plant is operating, customers are receiving the resulting product, and a second plant is being built at greater scale.
We still cannot say that CCS has become cheap or routine for cement. Brevik sits inside Norway's heavily supported Longship system, while Padeswood depends on the UK's CCUS framework.
But the technical question has moved forward. Full-scale cement capture is no longer hypothetical. The harder question now is how many plants can be made economical.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Why are hydrogen and power CCUS projects still getting delayed?
Hydrogen and some power-sector CCUS projects are struggling because capturing CO2 does not fix weak customer demand or expensive project economics.
The IEA's newest Global Hydrogen Review gives us a particularly fresh warning. Only one large project producing hydrogen from fossil fuels with CCUS began operating in 2025, and just two smaller additions were expected in 2026. Several other projects slipped because the associated carbon transport and storage infrastructure was not ready.
Demand has also been weaker than developers expected. Low-emissions hydrogen often costs considerably more than conventional hydrogen, and potential buyers have been reluctant to sign the long contracts required to finance billion-dollar plants. The IEA found that hydrogen projects using both electrolysis and CCUS have been delayed, paused or cancelled as firm offtake failed to materialize.
Power capture has its own problem. Flue gas from a power station typically contains a lower concentration of CO2 than streams from ethanol, ammonia or some gas-processing facilities, so separation can require more equipment and energy. Projects therefore need a sufficiently valuable carbon incentive or a long-term contract that pays for low-carbon electricity.
This is why CCUS growth looks uneven even inside countries with supportive policies. Cheap capture attached to an existing high-purity CO2 stream can move ahead while an expensive power or hydrogen project next door struggles.
The market is starting to sort applications by what can actually get financed under today's carbon prices and subsidy levels. Hydrogen and power are exposing the limits pretty quickly.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly funding for CCUS startups
Is the US CCUS market still growing after the subsidy changes?
Yes, the US CCUS market is still growing, especially around CO2 storage and lower-cost capture, while some of the more ambitious capture projects have been pushed back.
US policy support remains substantial. Section 45Q still provides an enhanced credit of up to $85 per tonne for qualifying point-source CO2 that meets the wage and apprenticeship rules and is geologically stored, with direct air capture eligible for as much as $180 per tonne. The 2025 tax law also changed the credit so qualifying EOR and utilisation projects placed in service after the law's enactment can receive the same base credit treatment as permanent storage.
That policy durability matters because developers had been worried that the post-IRA carbon capture incentives could be weakened much more aggressively.
Yet money per tonne does not solve every project. The IEA's latest CCUS database found significant additions to North American storage capacity while progress on capture slowed as several projects were paused or delayed. The economics remain strongest in places such as ethanol and fertilizer, where concentrated CO2 streams are cheaper to capture.
Long-distance pipeline projects have also run into permitting, route and community opposition. A regional CCUS hub can have dozens of potential emitters, but those plants cannot use shared storage if the connecting pipeline never gets built.
The US market is therefore becoming more selective. Storage developers and low-cost capture projects still have a powerful federal incentive. Higher-cost projects need additional revenue or unusually favorable economics.
That shakeout makes the US pipeline less spectacular on paper, but probably more credible.
Is Europe now the center of CCUS growth?
Europe currently has the clearest evidence of CCUS turning into a connected infrastructure market, especially around the North Sea.
The region now combines industrial capture plants, dedicated CO2 ships, cross-border storage contracts, regulated transport networks, storage permits and government-backed revenue models. Very few other regions have all of those pieces moving at the same time.
The UK has pushed two large cluster systems through financial close. Its latest government plan puts potential storage capacity at up to 4 Mtpa for the East Coast Cluster and 4.5 Mtpa for HyNet once the initial networks are fully used. Additional capture projects are already being negotiated to fill those systems.
The EU is simultaneously trying to remove the storage bottleneck. Its latest assessment says more than 19 Mtpa of injection capacity should become available to heavy industry over the next few years, while the 2030 target is 50 Mtpa. Oil and gas producers have also been given legal responsibility for helping deliver that capacity.
Europe is also showing the limits of the current build-out. Porthos is already deep into construction around Rotterdam, with pipelines installed and wells converted, but start-up recently slipped into the second half of 2027. Complex CO2 infrastructure is behaving like complex infrastructure usually does: schedules move.
That delay does not change the regional ranking. Europe has more evidence of an integrated CCUS market taking shape than anywhere else right now.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, compares the main business model options for carbon capture project developers
Is Asia-Pacific becoming a serious CCUS market?
Yes, Asia-Pacific is becoming a more serious CCUS market, with operating storage in Australia and a much clearer policy push in China than we had even recently.
Australia gives us some of the freshest physical evidence. Geoscience Australia's latest national project dataset counts 18 CCS projects in various stages of development or operation, including two commercial-scale operating facilities: Gorgon and Moomba.
Moomba is particularly useful because we can see actual injected volume rather than nameplate capacity. Santos recently reported that the facility had permanently stored 2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in just over 18 months. Its current first-phase capacity is around 1.7 Mtpa, while Santos says the wider Cooper Basin could eventually support much larger third-party storage volumes.
Gorgon has a much longer and more difficult history, including years of underperformance against its original capture goals, but Geoscience Australia reports more than 11 million tonnes cumulatively stored. Taken together, Gorgon and Moomba show both sides of Australian CCS: operating experience is real, but getting facilities to perform exactly as designed has been difficult.
China has now added another important piece. Its newly released 2026-2030 oil and gas plan sets an explicit goal of reaching 10 million tonnes per year of CO2 injection through CCS and CCUS projects by 2030. For a country of China's emissions scale, 10 million tonnes is small. For the CCUS industry, a quantified national deployment target from China is significant.
Asia-Pacific remains fragmented compared with Europe, and Australia still has only two commercial-scale operating projects. But the market is clearly moving beyond scattered demonstrations.
Are CCUS hubs actually making the market easier to scale?
Yes, shared CCUS hubs are making projects easier to replicate because each new emitter no longer needs to build an entire CO2 transport and storage system from scratch.
The basic economics are compelling. A cement plant, waste incinerator or hydrogen facility can focus on capturing and conditioning its CO2, then pay a separate network to move and store it. Pipelines, ships, compressor stations, wells and geological monitoring can be shared across several customers.
We can already see that architecture in the UK. HyNet and the East Coast Cluster were financed around common transport and storage networks first, then additional emitters could be added around them. The UK government is now negotiating with more capture projects specifically to fill existing network capacity.
Northern Lights uses a different version of the same model. Instead of requiring every emitter to sit beside a pipeline, it collects liquefied CO2 by ship from several European countries. Its second phase reuses the original terminal and offshore system while adding tanks, wells, ships and handling capacity.
The supplier side is broadening as well. The Global CCS Institute's 2026 technology review now covers more than 190 CCS technologies from more than 90 companies, up from more than 160 technologies supplied by over 80 companies in the previous edition.
CCUS still has a long way to go before building a capture plant feels like ordering a solar farm. But shared infrastructure is already cutting down the amount of bespoke infrastructure each new emitter needs.
This chart, featured in our CCUS market deck, illustrates revenue distribution by customer segment in the CCUS market
How much of the huge CCUS pipeline should we actually believe?
We should heavily discount the headline CCUS pipeline and pay much more attention to projects that have reached FID, construction or operation.
Two independent datasets show how large the gap still is.
The Global CCS Institute's latest annual status report counted about 513 Mtpa of capture capacity across operating and development-stage projects. Only 64 Mtpa was operating and 44 Mtpa was under construction. Those two harder categories add up to about 108 Mtpa, roughly 21% of the total pipeline.
The IEA approaches the problem differently and reaches an equally sobering result. Around 90% of projects announced for operation by 2035 have not yet reached FID. Its latest update also found that total potential 2035 capture capacity stayed around 425 Mtpa while more projects shifted toward later start dates because of permitting problems, construction delays and market uncertainty.
That gives us a useful hierarchy. Operating tonnes deserve the most confidence. Construction projects come next. FID projects are serious but still face execution risk. Everything before FID should carry a steep probability discount.
Even advanced projects can move. Porthos already has physical infrastructure in the ground and still slipped its commissioning timetable. An early-stage project with no financing deserves far less certainty.
The market can therefore be growing strongly while most of its announced pipeline remains unreliable. There is no contradiction there once every project in the database stops being treated as equally real.
Is CCUS big enough to matter yet?
CCUS is big enough to support a real industrial market now, but still far too small to have a large effect on global emissions.
From a business perspective, the industry has crossed an important threshold. Dozens of facilities are operating, dozens more are under construction, annual investment has reached several billion dollars and major transport and storage networks are being financed separately from capture plants. That creates actual demand for capture equipment, engineering, solvents, compressors, pipelines, ships, drilling, subsurface modelling, monitoring and project finance.
The emissions comparison is much harsher. Around 64 Mtpa of operating global capture capacity against nearly 38.4 billion tonnes of annual energy-related CO2 emissions works out to roughly 0.17%. Actual captured and stored volumes are lower because nameplate capacity assumes full utilization.
For comparison, the IEA estimates that solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles and heat pumps deployed since 2019 collectively avoided around 3 billion tonnes of annual CO2 emissions in 2025. That is almost fifty times the 64 Mtpa nameplate capacity of the entire operating CCS fleet in the Global CCS Institute's snapshot.
CCUS can still be important in industries where alternatives are scarce, especially cement, chemicals and some carbon-removal applications.
Commercially, the market already matters. Climatically, it remains very early. That distinction is hard to get around.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows how carbon removal marketplace technology has evolved over time
So, is the CCUS market growing now?
Yes. The CCUS market is growing now, and the latest evidence is strong enough to call it a genuine infrastructure build-out rather than another cycle of project announcements.
The clearest change is happening before the tonnes show up. Investment has risen more than fifteenfold since 2020. More than 30 projects reached FID in two years. Capture capacity already operating or under construction grew by more than 10% in the IEA's latest annual comparison, while storage capacity jumped around 25%. Commercial banks are financing projects, third-party storage contracts exist, cement capture is operating at industrial scale and governments are building regional CO2 networks designed for multiple customers.
The recent geographic expansion strengthens the case. Europe is accelerating storage permits and cluster construction. Australia now has two commercial-scale operating storage projects, with Moomba passing 2 million tonnes injected. China has just added a 10 Mtpa CCUS injection objective for 2030 to its new oil and gas plan.
The weak points remain serious. Around 90% of announced 2035 projects have yet to reach FID. Hydrogen projects are still disappearing when customers will not sign contracts. Expensive capture applications struggle even in countries with large subsidies. Public money remains deeply embedded in the economics, and newly built storage networks still need enough emitters to fill them.
The best description of CCUS today is an early infrastructure growth market. Construction, financing and storage are already accelerating. Actual captured tonnes are following more slowly.
OUR METHODOLOGY
“Is the CCUS market growing?” does not have a useful one-number answer. Project announcements can rise while construction stalls, investment can accelerate before captured volumes do, and storage infrastructure can expand faster than capture itself. We therefore assessed the market through operating deployment, projects reaching construction and FID, capital committed, transport and storage infrastructure, commercial adoption, policy support, sector-level progress and geographic expansion.
We gave more weight to evidence that represents real commitment. An operating facility carries more weight than an announced one; construction and FID carry more weight than an early development pipeline; financial close, commercial debt and contracted storage capacity carry more weight than non-binding targets. No single metric was treated as decisive. We looked for several independent measures moving in the same direction.
We also kept categories separate where combining them would distort the answer. Nameplate capture capacity is not the same as CO2 actually captured and permanently stored. Project count is not the same as physical capacity. Capture, transport and storage can grow at different rates. Commercial market growth is also different from CCUS becoming large enough to materially change global emissions.
Sector and regional comparisons were used where the economics are materially different. Cement, hydrogen, power and high-purity industrial capture do not face the same capture costs or customer economics. Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific also use different combinations of tax credits, public funding, regulated infrastructure and government-backed contracts.
The announced pipeline was deliberately treated with caution. Projects already operating received the greatest weight, followed by construction and FID. Earlier-stage projects were used mainly to understand the direction and potential size of the market rather than as evidence that future capacity will definitely be built.
Key sources include the IEA's Financing CCUS at Scale, the IEA CCUS Projects Database, the IEA's 2025-2026 capacity comparison and 2035 project-status comparison, plus its latest CCUS policy and financing review.
For global operating and construction figures, we used the Global CCS Institute's Global Status of CCS and its 2025 deployment figures. Project-level evidence came from primary sources including Heidelberg Materials on Brevik, Heidelberg Materials on Padeswood, Porthos, and Santos on Moomba CCS.
Government and regional evidence came from the UK government's CCUS programme, the European Commission's progress report on CO2 injection capacity, Geoscience Australia's national CCS project dataset, and China's 2026-2030 oil and gas development plan. We also used the IEA Global Hydrogen Review 2026 for hydrogen project progress and the IEA Global Energy Review 2026 for the comparison with global energy-related CO2 emissions.
The final judgment is an aggregation of this evidence rather than a market-size forecast. The question is whether observable deployment, financing and commercial infrastructure are expanding now. On that test, CCUS is growing, even though a large majority of the announced pipeline remains uncertain and actual captured tonnes are increasing more slowly than investment and construction.
In our CCUS market deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
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