SCALING UP CARBON CAPTURE.

• Position: ATMOSPHERE

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), or carbon capture and storage (CCS), is a set of technologies used to strip carbon dioxide from industrial waste gases or directly from the atmosphere. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it either is stored permanently underground or it is used for a range of industrial applications, such as C[O.sub.2]-derived fuels or building materials. CCUS technologies are likely to play a key role in the fight against climate change, with the United Nations estimating that CCUS could mitigate between 1.5 and 6.3 gigatonnes of C[O.sub.2] equivalents per year by 2050, according to an IDTechEx study.

The world already has taken steps along this pathway. Over the last decade, the deployment of carbon capture technology has been scaling up steadily, with global capacity reaching 40,000,000 metric tons in 2020. Plans for more than 30 new CCUS facilities have been announced since 2017. If all of these projects proceeded, global capture capacity would triple to around 140,000,000 metric tons per year.

However, this is a drop in the ocean compared with global C[O.sub.2] emissions, which reached 36,000,000,000 metric tons in 2019. Although global emissions are believed to have dropped to around 31,000,000.000 metric tons in 2020, stemming from the global slowdown in the wake of COVID-19, this probably is a blip in the wider picture, and global C[O.sub.2] emissions are likely to continue growing over the next few years. For CCUS to have a meaningful impact on emissions in a timely manner, it will need to scale up hundreds of times compared with today's levels.

CCUS technologies also face some major hurdles that could hamper widespread deployment. Although each aspect of C[O.sub.2] capture, utilization, and storage faces its own roadblocks, a common challenge confronting all aspects of the industry is that of economics.

Separating out C[O.sub.2] from a mixture of gases is...