Carbon Capture (CCUS): Governance, Policy, & Social License

Analyze the debate around CCUS for decarbonizing cement, steel, and chemicals in hard-to-abate industries. Examine cost, scale, public trust, and governance implications shaping policy and social license.

Explore the governance, policy, and social license questions around CCUS by weighing supporters' aims to address hard-to-abate sectors and removal options against cost, equity, and long-term risk concerns.

Barendrecht shows that perfect geology and risk metrics fail without social readiness, underscoring early engagement, plain-language information, and transparent dialogue as essential for CCUS governance and social license.

Tomakomai shows offshore co2 storage can succeed when government-led public education, early community engagement, and open monitoring data build trust and relevance to energy security.

Explore how governance, policy, and social license shape CCUS projects, with public trust as the decisive factor guiding transparency, liability, public consultation, and long-term monitoring.

Explore how CCUS is perceived across trust, risk, and public attitudes while preparing to examine the nuts and bolts of capture, transport, utilization, and underground storage in module 2.

Explore the CCUS chain that moves CO2 from an industrial source to underground storage. Follow generation, separation, capture, purification and compression, transport, and deep underground injection steps—plus enhanced oil recovery.

Enhanced oil recovery uses CO2 to mobilize oil, demonstrating large-scale injection and long-term containment, while CCUS storage remains essential and utilization plays a supporting role.

The lecture identifies cement, steel, chemicals and fertilizers, refineries, and power generation as the main CO2 sources, explaining calcination and industrial processes that drive emissions and decarbonization challenges.

Explore the easiest carbon dioxide to capture, focusing on nearly pure streams from lng facilities, natural gas processing, ammonia and fertilizer plants, and ethanol fermentation to lower ccus costs.

Move captured co2 through pipelines, ships, or trucks and rail as the middle link in ccus value chains, enabling large-scale flows, cross-border transport, and pilot projects.

Explore geological storage of CO2, moving from surface engineering to deep-time geology, including deep saline aquifers, depleted oil and gas fields, basalt mineral trapping, and the four trapping mechanisms.

Evaluate life cycle emissions to confirm real climate benefits of CCUS projects by accounting for capture energy, compression, transport, storage energy use, uncaptured CO2, and electricity carbon intensity.

See how Technology Center Mongstad tests large-scale ccus capture tech with real flue gas, guiding validation, regulatory standards, and investment decisions for global decarbonization.

CCUS appears in global climate pathways as a complementary tool to renewables and efficiency, tackling process emissions in heavy industry and parts of power generation.

Explore how IPCC's sixth assessment report highlights CCUS as essential for hard-to-abate sectors like cement and steelmaking, enables net-zero emissions at scale, and lowers mitigation costs through removal pathways.

Explore carbon capture, utilization, and storage scale-up to 2030 and 2050, covering direct air capture, bioenergy with ccus, industry, power, and fuel transformation shares.

Explore alternative futures with less ccus by examining rapid electrification, high carbon prices, efficiency gains, and behavior shifts, and learn why policy portfolios include renewables, hydrogen, ccus, and nature-based options.

Make a managerial decision on CCUS investment now or waiting for clear policy signals, balancing long-term geological guarantees, infrastructure access, stable incentives, and social license from community acceptance.

Explore the international legal framework governing cross-border CO2 transport and offshore storage, focusing on the London Protocol and its role in shaping global CCUS cooperation.

Geography drives CCUS deployment, as emissions and storage locations often differ across borders. Clear transboundary law enables cross-border CO2 transport to support regional decarbonization and storage hubs.

The London Convention and London Protocol govern offshore CO2 storage, prohibiting dumping at sea unless explicitly allowed, which historically blocked cross-border CO2 transport and slowed CCUS planning.

The 2009 amendment to the London Protocol permits exporting CO2 for offshore geological storage under environmental and safety conditions, but it has not entered into force due to insufficient ratifications.

The 2019 provisional solution enables transboundary CO2 transport for offshore storage via bilateral agreements that safeguard the environment, bypassing the 2009 amendment delay.

Explore how the Belgium-Denmark agreement enables cross-border CO2 transport and offshore storage under the London Protocol, illustrating CCUS governance, liability, transparency, and North Sea storage hubs.

Explore how eu carbon capturing storage directive governs ccus in europe, detailing site selection, permitting, monitoring, liability, and how the ets incentivizes ccus by treating stored co2 as not emitted.

Explore how the EU's net zero industry act scales CCUS from pilots to large-scale deployment, streamlining permits and targeting 50 million tons of CO2 stored annually by 2030.

Analyze how the EU environmental impact assessment directive governs CCUS projects, ensuring mitigation measures, public participation, and transparency to safeguard environment, sustainability, and regulatory accountability.

Explain how international and regional frameworks regulate CCUS infrastructure and how policy instruments such as tax credits, subsidies, contracts for difference, state participation, and R&D funding drive economic viability.

Explore why CCUS needs government policy support to translate its technical readiness into climate benefits, detailing high upfront costs, lack of revenue streams, long timelines, and regulatory uncertainty.

Governments shape CCUS economics with financial, regulatory, and institutional tools to reduce risk and address public-good and first-mover failures, making CCUS bankable and scalable for investors and developers.

coordinate CCUS value-chain components—the capture plant, pipelines or ships for transport, and storage—and secure permits, regulations, and public acceptance, addressing simultaneity and relying on policy frameworks that complement carbon pricing.

Use tax credits to accelerate early CCUS projects by improving economics. Per-ton credits pay for each ton captured and stored or used, while investment tax credits reduce upfront capital costs.

Leverage the US 45Q tax and Inflation Reduction Act incentives to transform CCUS projects from cost centers into profitable investments, enabling ethanol plants, hydrogen hubs, and DEC-plus storage pipelines.

Canada's refundable investment tax credit backs CCUS capital upfront, offering up to 50% for industrial capture and 37.5% for transport and storage, with extended rates for 2031–2035.

Carbon contracts for difference set a price floor for CO2, stabilizing revenues and derisking CCUS investments, while CGF has not offered CCFDs to oil and gas producers, creating access gaps.

Subsidies help close the gap between costs and revenues for CCUS projects, making early deployment bankable, with Denmark and the Netherlands illustrating cost-effective, technology-neutral designs.

State participation models in ccus accelerate deployment by co-investing, sharing liability, and owning transport and storage. Norway, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia illustrate centralized, open-access pipelines and fast, large-scale hubs.

Public grants and research programs fund government CCUS R&D, supporting early-stage science, pilot projects, and validation facilities to advance capture materials, solvents, and monitoring systems for scalable decarbonization.

Explore how Japan, the United States, and Europe fund CCS research, highlighting solvents, low-energy capture, offshore monitoring, CO2 shipping, DAC cost reductions, modular capture, MRV, and next-gen sorbents.

Explore how public acceptance governs CCUS deployment by examining social license, trust, land use, risk perception, and environmental justice, and assess stakeholder perspectives across countries.

Identify key public acceptance drivers for CCUS projects, including location decisions, safety risk management, trust and engagement, local fairness, and transparency, while framing CCUS within a broader decarbonization strategy.

In the UK, public awareness of CCS rose from 62% to 69%, but understanding remains weak. This gap invites deeper engagement, trust-building, and two-way dialogue with communities near planned infrastructure.

Public support for ccs in the uk stays steady, but opposition grows and many remain undecided; information, trust, and how ccs fits the climate plan shape outcomes.

Offshore CCS in Denmark attracts more acceptance as distance from homes grows; engage targeted communities with tailored communication to secure social license and governance buy-in.

Assess how CO2 transport and geological storage raise safety and social license concerns, including high-pressure pipelines, potential leaks, asphyxiation risks, monitoring, and community engagement for fair siting.

Explore how public acceptance shapes CCUS infrastructure through the US-Midwest pipeline dispute, highlighting land rights, local politics, environmental justice, and regulatory fragmentation driving deployment.

Summit's project builds a 2,000-plus mile CO2 pipeline to capture, transport, and store up to 18 million tons of CO2 from ethanol plants to storage, illustrating CCUS governance and policy.

Explores how a CO2 pipeline for carbon capture raises governance, policy, and social license questions as it intersects land, livelihoods, and trust in Midwest communities.

Identify six major risks for a US Midwest carbon capture pipeline: land access and eminent domain, lawsuits, stricter regulations, regulatory uncertainty, political pushback, and public protest.

Shift focus from CCUS as an emission reduction tool to carbon dioxide removal, highlighting technologies and natural processes that remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

Differentiate CCS from CDR and show how CCS traps CO2 from point sources or air, while CDR removes CO2 from the atmosphere through DAC and nature-based solutions.

Explore two carbon dioxide removal families, nature-based solutions and engineered approaches, and key types like afforestation, soil carbon sequestration, biochar, and direct air capture with storage.

Identify the three criteria for real carbon dioxide removal: physical removal, long-term storage, and additionality, with rigorous accounting to ensure climate integrity.

MRV, or monitoring, reporting, and verification, serves as the quality control for carbon dioxide removal, ensuring real, durable, and leak-free removals. It underpins environmental integrity, market confidence, and policy support.

Learn how policy tools and carbon markets finance high quality carbon removal, aligning compliance and voluntary markets with both nature based and engineered approaches.

Examine the costs of carbon removal, like DEC up to $700 per ton, and how R&D and co-benefits such as soil health and jobs can lower costs and advance equity.

Understand CCUS as a policy choice, governance challenge, and social license shaping emissions management. Assess how laws, incentives, and public trust influence project viability.