Anticipating a potential deficit in global carbon capture demand in 2030 despite benchmarking strategies

Why this matters for our climate future

As the world races to cut greenhouse gas emissions, carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is often held up as a crucial tool: it can trap carbon dioxide from smokestacks or even from the air and lock it away underground or turn it into useful products. This study takes a hard look at how CCUS is actually rolling out around the globe, which countries are leading or lagging, what drives success, and whether current efforts can realistically help meet climate targets by 2030 and beyond.

Where carbon capture projects are taking shape

The authors compile data on CCUS projects worldwide from 2013 to 2024 and find that deployment has grown quickly on paper but remains tiny compared with global emissions. By 2024, 21 countries had operating projects capturing about 0.172 billion tons of CO2 per year—less than 1% of annual emissions. The bulk of real activity is clustered in the United States and Canada, which together account for over three quarters of operating capacity. These countries benefit from strong policy support, mature industries, and shared pipelines and storage sites. Europe is building a substantial project pipeline, while many nations in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere have only small, scattered efforts still stuck at the research or demonstration stage.

Policies, inventions, and costs: what really drives growth

To understand what makes some countries more successful, the study uses machine learning to untangle the roles of three main forces: public policy, technological innovation, and cost. Across nations, policy and technology together explain most of the differences in capture scale, with cost playing a smaller but still important role. Strong and sustained policy signals—such as tax credits in North America or cluster plans in the United Kingdom—are especially powerful during early rollout, even when costs are high. Patents and other indicators of technological capability are also tightly linked to larger capture volumes, underscoring that a healthy innovation system is essential for CCUS to move beyond pilot plants.

Uneven progress and a widening gap

The global picture is marked by stark inequality. A few "first movers" are racing ahead while most countries remain on the sidelines, a pattern the authors liken to a Matthew Effect of "the rich get richer." Using the Gini coefficient—a standard measure of inequality—they find that the imbalance in capture capacity between countries has stayed extremely high, between 0.70 and 0.84, and has worsened since 2020. Policies are gradually spreading, with more nations adopting supportive measures, but technological know‑how and real, operating capacity remain highly concentrated. Many lower‑capacity countries depend on imported know‑how, have weak institutions, and lack pipelines, storage sites, and finance, which makes it hard for projects to move beyond studies and trials.

What if everyone improved at the same time?

The researchers then explore "what‑if" futures using counterfactual scenarios. They simulate how global capture might grow if countries matched the best‑observed improvements in policy strength, technology progress, and cost reductions. Technology improvements yield the largest boost, while policy upgrades and cheaper capture add smaller but meaningful gains, especially in countries that currently have little capacity. Combining all three levers could raise global capture by about 22.7% above what would otherwise occur and double capacity to roughly 1 billion tons per year by 2030. Yet even in this optimistic blend, there remains a gap of about one‑third compared with the 1.67 billion tons per year that international energy roadmaps say are needed by then.

What this means for the path ahead

For non‑specialists, the takeaway is straightforward but sobering. CCUS is growing, and the right mix of policies, innovation, and cost reductions can speed it up significantly—especially in countries that are only just beginning. But today’s "business as improved" trajectory still falls well short of what climate goals require. Closing that gap will demand more than scattered pilot plants and national incentives; it will require coordinated international governance, stronger financial tools, shared infrastructure across borders, and deliberate efforts to spread technology and know‑how to countries that currently risk being left behind.

Citation: Yang, L., Qiu, M., Huang, S. et al. Anticipating a potential deficit in global carbon capture demand in 2030 despite benchmarking strategies. npj Environ. Soc. Sci. 1, 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44432-025-00002-0

Keywords: carbon capture, CCUS deployment, climate policy, clean energy technology, global inequality