Technology Scouting – Carbon Capture: From Today’s to Novel Technologies (Concawe Report 18/20)

Report no. 18/20: The EU Commission has recently published its long-term strategic vision exploring different scenarios leading to an EU low-carbon economy by 2050. In all these scenarios, the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been identified as a key technology to achieve this ambitious target, playing a crucial role to reduce emission levels required to limit global warming to 2°C and pursuit efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. This study, conducted by Future Bridge at the request of Concawe, provides an overview of the carbon capture technologies state-of-art, with a focus not only on the commercial but also on the near-term technologies, which are likely to be commercialized in the 2025-2030 timeframe, and on the several new emerging technologies.

For this mapping exercise, FutureBridge has considered various techno-economic factors such as carbon capture efficiency/rates, purity, cost of CO₂ capture per ton, levelised cost of electricity, risks and barriers to assessing the near-term and emerging carbon capture technologies. It has collected information from patents, scientific literature, published techno-commercial reports, white papers, annual reports and sustainability reports to assess the overall available technologies around carbon capture. In addition to this, FutureBridge has also analyzed the published front-end engineering and design reports, integrated assessment models, and techno-economic analysis report for pilot and demonstration plants to gauge the near-term commercial carbon capture technologies.