Defossilizing Industry Scaling-up CCU 2025

From an emissions perspective, CCU provides an opportunity to reduce emissions from industrial value chains, as well as emissions avoidance and carbon removal in some cases.4 CCU can also promote broader adoption of carbon capture technologies. Carbon capture in isolation is not inherently productive and, without policy support, generally represents an added cost to conventional production.5 However, in combination with utilization, there is an opportunity to offset these additional costs by introducing an additional revenue stream, potentially stackable with government subsidies. CCU is an emerging field and currently there are differing interpretations of emissions reduction benefits depending on life-cycle assumptions and baselines used.6 As technology pathways and applications mature, the evidence base of greenhouse gas reduction will need to grow accordingly, as confidence in these outcomes will ultimately determine whether CCU is scaled up. Figure 1 represents a simplified distillation of outcomes, which all assume the use of decarbonized electricity and feedstocks. The potential emissions benefits from CCU vary depending on the end-use of the utilization product, storage duration and carbon source. If fossil emissions are utilized for short duration products such as chemicals or fuels, the direct impact on net atmospheric emissions is modest, although it displaces an equivalent quantity of new fossil emissions that would have otherwise been created. In theory, this results in avoided emissions, compared to a scenario in which the fossil carbon was not reused; however, the extent of this will be dependent on the efficiencies of carbon capture and process of conversion to the final product.7 For capture and utilization that results in permanent storage of fossil carbon, the result is a reduction of emissions compared to business-as-usual, equivalent to CCS. Given their abundance, the use of fossil point source emissions could support the scaling-up of CCU technologies, providing economic as well as potential emissions benefits. However, claims of emissions benefits must be demonstrated with cradle-to-grave life-cycle analysis (LCA) and CCU must not be applied to extend the life of otherwise avoidable fossil emissions. For utilization to be net-neutral or carbon negative, biogenic and atmospheric emissions sources must be used as no additional carbon is added into circulation.8,9,10 Both the cost and availability of captured carbon emissions will influence the scalability of CCU applications (see Figure 2). Currently, atmospheric emissions are the most expensive and least abundant, with direct air capture (DAC) deployment in its infancy. More abundant emissions sources therefore have the potential to be near- to mid-term enablers of scale. This includes both point source emissions from industrial sectors with unavoidable emissions, such as lime production, waste, and paper and pulp, in addition to biogenic sources from ethanol, waste, biogas and bioenergy facilities. By converting captured CO2 and other carbon emissions into carbon-based products, CCU can generate value from waste streams and potentially contribute emissions benefits. Defossilizing Industry: Considerations for Scaling-up Carbon Capture and Utilization Pathways 6