The role of carbon capture in decarbonising EU industries: A review of projections for 2030 and 2050

Energy-intensive industries are expected to play a significant role in this deployment of carbon capture. However, the distribution of CO2 capture deployment across industry sectors remains uncertain as it will depend on various factors, and sectoral projections available in the literature have a wide spread and are often not comparable. In response to the identified research gap, this work examines projections for CO2 capture deployment within the EU industrial sectors, focusing on the cement, iron and steel, and chemical industries, for 2030 and 2050. We harmonize and discuss sectoral projections from seventeen scenarios, and in order to draw cross-sectoral conclusions, we compare them with 820 aggregated, EU-wide industry scenarios. The sectoral projections mapped project carbon capture to significantly reduce emissions in the cement sector by an average of 70 % by 2050. In the near term, projections for 2030 show the highest emission reductions in the chemical sector (10 %), followed by cement (7 %) and iron and steel (5 %). Sectoral projections align well with EU-wide scenarios, particularly with those complying with global 2 °C targets. Notably, many scenarios exceed the Net-Zero Industry Act target for 2030 and project capture levels beyond historical uptake trends of clean energy technologies. The findings highlight that while long-term projections consistently foresee large-scale deployment of CO₂ capture across EU industry, near-term expectations remain modest and risk falling short of the 2030 needs.