Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) can help reduce emissions across the world’s most difficult-to-decarbonize industrial sectors — but its application should be limited to niche uses[1] that cannot be readily electrified like carbon-intensive feedstocks and some high-temperature heat needs. A range of cheaper and more efficient existing options can reduce emissions for many industrial processes.
Nearly a third of total U.S. emissions come from the industrial sector, this is because many production and manufacturing processes require high levels of heat — which come almost entirely from burning fossil fuels. CCUS could play an important role reducing pollution across the industrial sector because of the associated benefits with reducing emissions across broad swaths of production, processing, and manufacturing.
What is CCUS?
CCUS is the process of capturing carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants or industrial facilities. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is then compressed and transported from a facility, often via pipeline, to either be used as a feedstock to create additional products, or permanently stored underground.
CCUS does have downsides like prolonging the life of fossil fuel infrastructure and generally relying on capital-intensive facilities that keep costs high. It also fails to address the upstream emissions associated with extracting fossil fuels, only captures around 90 percent of CO2 emissions at the point of combustion, and doesn’t address other harmful pollutants produced by burning fossil fuels.
Long-term CCUS applications
However, CCUS could play an important role in reducing long-term industrial emissions, particularly for parts of the manufacturing and production processes where cost-effective solutions to reducing emissions are not yet on the horizon.
Among CCUS’s most promising long-term applications in the industrial sector is the potential to reduce “process emissions,” or emissions separate from energy use that occur as a byproduct of turning raw materials into the end product. Cement, glass, and chemicals, for instance, all produce process emissions that cannot be eliminated by simply cleaning up the fuels used for energy.
CCUS could also be vital to capturing CO2 from burning biofuels or synthetic gas. The important difference between capturing CO2 from biofuel plants versus fossil fuel plants is that the former captures carbon that was released more recently by plants, rather than carbon that’s been stored underground for millions of years. In other words, capturing plant-based emissions avoids adding new carbon to the system.
Near-term CCUS applications
CCUS may be temporarily needed across other industrial processes to reduce near-term emissions before further technological innovations can reduce emissions more permanently.
For instance, the byproducts of crude oil processing — such as refinery fuel gas or petroleum coke — can be converted into “blue hydrogen” rather than just burning those byproducts, which would reduce emissions and enhance efficiency. CCUS may also be critical in the near-term to reduce emissions from high-temperature processes required to manufacture many products. Low-temperature industrial processes that create products like food, paper, textiles, and wood products are better positioned to reduce emissions through electrification[2] — specifically, heat pumps[3] — as high-temperature processes are more difficult and costly to electrify using today’s technologies. But CCUS could play an essential role in reducing near-term emissions throughout high-temperature industrial processes alongside low-carbon fuels.
The technology could also play a larger role addressing emissions from CO2 streams where the carbon is already concentrated and easy to separate, also known as a “high-purity” CO2 stream. This includes sources like ethanol and natural gas, both of which are significantly cheaper to capture[4] than carbon produced through steel production and refining ($60-66 per metric ton of CO2 versus $159-163/mt CO2). This application may not be necessary long-term, however, as many high-purity CO2 sources will be phased out as more sectors of the economy reduce carbon emissions.
Finally, CCUS is a useful tool to reduce emissions at newly built power plants and industrial facilities that are unlikely to switch to cleaner fuels in the near term because they still have several decades of useful life left.
The future of CCUS
CCUS is a promising method of reducing long-term emissions from some of the hardest to clean up industrial processes and could also be effective in reducing near-term emissions from sectors where decarbonization technology is not yet commercially viable, or when solutions remain otherwise cost-prohibitive.
Because of this, other tools should be a higher priority for the industrial sector to increase efficiency and reduce emissions across the economy more effectively.
Energy and material efficiency remain low-hanging solutions to save manufacturers money while reducing their carbon footprint. The industrial sector should also prioritize electrifying its processes and switching from traditional fossil fuels to lower-carbon fuels like biomass and hydrogen. These strategies are the most effective ways to both reduce fossil fuel demand and replace the fuels themselves. Most importantly, these solutions reduce emissions further up the supply chain by eliminating the need to pull fossil fuels out of the ground in the first place.
[1] Sonali Deshpande. Carbon Capture, Utilization, And Storage (CCUS) In Clean Industry. Energy Innovation. (February 2026).
[2] Jeffrey Rissman. Decarbonizing Low-Temperature Industrial Heat In The U.S.. Energy Innovation. (October 2022).
[3] Energy Innovation. Are Electric Heat Pumps Cheaper Than Gas Furnaces?. Energy Innovation. (March 2026).
[4] U.S. Department of Energy. Pathways To Commercial Liftoff: Carbon Management. U.S. Department of Energy. (April 2023).
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Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is the process of capturing carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants or industrial facilities.
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