Bringing Carbon Capture to Scale: A Framework for Matching Chemistry to Context

Steve Griffiths
American University of Sharjah

DOI: 10.25453/fpprize.32065875

Chemistry advances driving industrial carbon capture technologies (Nature Reviews Chemistry, 2025)

“Our research evaluates five carbon capture technology families, giving industry and policymakers a clear, evidence-based picture of what works, where, and how close it is to deployment.”

The industries that underpin our physical world, including oil and gas, iron and steel, cement and concrete, aluminum and ammonia, are collectively responsible for roughly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 85% of manufacturing emissions. Unlike buildings or passenger transport, these sectors cannot be fully decarbonized by electrification coupled with clean electricity supply. In cement production, for instance, more than half of CO₂ emissions come from calcination, the chemical decomposition of limestone fundamental to making clinker. In steelmaking, CO₂ is released when carbon reduces iron ore to metal. These are process emissions, inherent to the chemistry of production itself. For these emissions, carbon capture is not just one option among many. It is the most viable current pathway for reducing the carbon footprint of long-lived industrial infrastructure.

Operational CO₂ capture capacity globally stands at just over 60 million tons per year as of late 2025. This, however, is far short of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario, which projects CO₂ capture scaling to nearly 2.3 billion tons by 2035 and over 6 billion tons by 2050. While these figures represent an upper bound for decarbonization ambition and not a forecast we consider likely, they do indicate the scale to which CO₂ capture must grow if it is to play a key role in climate change mitigation. Further, it has become increasingly clear that unabated coal and natural gas will persist longer in power generation and industry than projections just a few years ago assumed. Paradoxically, this makes the eventual need for carbon capture even greater. That is, the longer fossil fuels remain in the energy system, the larger the role carbon capture must ultimately play.

Given the clear importance of CO₂ capture to climate change mitigation efforts, why has its deployment been so slow? A central problem is that carbon capture has been treated as a monolithic proposition. In policy discussions, carbon capture is either done or it isn’t. In practice, however, the exhaust gases from a cement kiln, containing 14–33% CO₂ at high temperature and often filled with particulates, look nothing like those from a natural gas processing plant, where CO₂ concentration can approach 95%, or from an aluminum smelter, where it falls below 1%. Treating these vastly different industrial contexts as if one CO₂ capture solution could fit all is analogous to believing the same medicine could be prescribed to any patient with a certain symptom regardless of their particular condition. Meanwhile, among the many research papers and reports produced each year on carbon capture materials and processes, few, if any, provide a clear organizing framework that links specific technologies and material chemistries to industrial applications. Policymakers, investors and plant operators alike lack a practical framework for assessing their choices.

Our research provides that framework. We systematically evaluated carbon capture technologies, organized into five distinct families, against the emissions profiles of major emissions-intensive, or “hard-to-abate”, industries. Chemical absorption uses liquid solvents, typically amines, that react with CO₂ and can be regenerated by heating. It is the most commercially mature approach and the one where chemistry-based innovations in solvent design most directly impact cost. Adsorption relies on solid materials, such as activated carbons, zeolites and metal–organic frameworks, that bind CO₂ to their surfaces. Membrane-based separation uses selective barriers that allow CO₂ to pass through preferentially, a challenge rooted in materials engineering. Cryogenic separation cools gas mixtures to physically isolate CO₂ by phase change, a thermodynamic and mechanical engineering challenge. Finally, electrochemically mediated capture, primarily electroswing, uses electrically driven cycles to capture and release CO₂ and sits at the frontier of electrochemistry and device design.

Each family has distinct strengths and limitations. The important insight is that these strengths and limitations are dependent on industrial context. For high-purity CO₂ streams, such as those from ethanol fermentation, natural gas sweetening and ammonia production, simpler separation approaches work well and have costs as low as 14 to 20 US dollars per ton of CO₂ captured. For moderate-concentration streams, such as cement (14–33% CO₂) and steel (16–40%), more sophisticated solvent- or sorbent-based systems are needed, and costs rise considerably. For dilute streams with less than 10% CO₂ concentration, such as flue gas from natural gas power generation or aluminum smelting, the thermodynamic penalty is steepest and the need for innovation most necessary. Our framework evaluates only technologies at Technology Readiness Level 4 (i.e., lab-scale prototype) or above with comparative performance data, ensuring the analysis is grounded in demonstrated capability rather than theoretical promise.

This framework has direct implications for how carbon capture can scale. Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) projects have historically been vertically integrated, with a single operator managing all steps from capture to transport to underground storage. This “full-chain” model worked for oil and gas companies with subsurface expertise, but does not scale to the diverse industrial landscape that needs to decarbonize. The IEA has documented a shift toward “part-chain” business models where specialized entities handle different segments of the value chain. CO₂ transport and storage are increasingly offered as shared infrastructure, with planned storage capacity reaching between 500 million and 1 billion tons per year by 2030, organized around multi-user hubs worldwide. If CO₂ transport and storage become commoditized horizontal infrastructure, much as electricity grids serve diverse generators, then the capture segment should ideally become a set of specialized solutions, each optimized for a specific industrial emissions profile. Companies already offer modular capture-as-a-service systems, and our framework provides the technical insights for tailoring capture solutions to context.

For the technology families where chemistry is the primary innovation lever, particularly chemical absorption and adsorption, which dominate near-term deployment, the single highest-impact research focus is the reduction of regeneration energy. After a solvent absorbs CO₂ or a sorbent binds it, energy is needed to release the captured CO₂ and recycle the capture material. This thermal regeneration step accounts for the largest share of operating cost in amine-based systems and is the dominant barrier to cost reduction. Innovations such as water-lean solvents, phase-change solvents and sterically hindered amines should be directed at the specific operating conditions of each target industry, not pursued in isolation from the deployment context. For membranes, the challenge is CO₂ selectivity while maintaining permeability. For cryogenics, it is the energy cost of deep cooling. Each technology family has a distinct path forward, and our framework helps direct research investment toward the innovations with the greatest deployment impact.

Six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, including the climate change boundary. Mitigating further environmental damage requires addressing approximately 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions from industries where energy efficiency and electrification, coupled with clean electricity supply alone, are insufficient. Our research takes an important step in the right direction by supporting efforts to make carbon capture viable at scale. It bridges the gap between laboratory innovation and industrial deployment by providing the systematic framework needed to match carbon capture technologies to industrial contexts, a prerequisite for scaling to the gigatonne annual CO₂ capture levels that climate change mitigation, and possibly reversal, requires.

Figure 1. The co-author team.