The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute has, as part of its thought leadership drive, released a report into the current investment cases for CCS projects around the world. Key takeaways from the report, apart from the well-known information that policy and regulation are currently essential to make a positive case for CCS, include:

• That policy support in the US (particularly the Inflation Reduction Act) has driven announcements for projects that at the time of the report have the potential to sequester 100 million (metric) tonnes per annum in the USA. However, revenue streams other than the Inflation Reduction Act are also important in making positive business cases – for example, in the Midwest of the USA, the blend (of ethanol and petroleum) mandate is another support, as are low carbon fuel standard credits.
• Policy and regulation around “permitting and gaining community acceptance is necessary to mitigate risks and accelerate deployment. Development of insurance and tax equity markets is also critical for deployment in scale.” These are often somewhat overlooked elements of infrastructure projects.
• For “clean” (presumably blue) hydrogen and ammonia, both the European Union carbon price and demand support in Asia are essential to making a positive commercial case for production; almost all projects in the US “depend on foreign demand and long-term offtake agreements”. (Examples of such cases have been covered in previous editions of the Combustion Industry News.)
• Policy support can in some cases be ‘stacked’ – for instance, clean ammonia projects can benefit from IRA subsidies, and then from EU carbon pricing.
• Ongoing policy support is important for continuing the rise of CCS deployment. For instance, the 12-year window of the IRA is “suboptimal” in the aspect that CCS projects often have lifetimes of 25 years or more. However, “recent changes to EU ETS trading scheme and proposed US EPA rules for power plants are steps in the right direction.”  Carbon pricing and emissions mandates are part of the necessary support – the Institute would hope to see them extended more broadly across the world.