Today, emissions-intensive industries that underpin modern society, namely oil and gas, iron and steel, cement and concrete, aluminium and chemicals, account for roughly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 85% of manufacturing emissions worldwide. Yet mitigation of emissions from these industries cannot be achieved by energy efficiency and electrification coupled with clean electricity supply alone. For example, chemicals, refining, iron and steel, cement and aluminium are produced via processes that release CO₂ through chemical reactions inherent to the processes themselves. For industries like these, the switch to clean energy to replace the fossil fuels currently used for process energy is only one part of the equation.

So how can getting carbon capture right help?

The carbon capture knowledge gap

Carbon capture currently accounts for less than 0.2% of global CO₂ emissions, meaning that for every 600 tonnes of CO₂ pumped into the atmosphere by heavy industry each year, less than one is being captured. That is the gap our research addresses.

Carbon capture, utilisation and storage is a foundational component of many net-zero pathways, especially for hard-to-abate industrial emissions and carbon dioxide removal. Yet despite decades of research, growing policy urgency and billions in public funding, deployment of carbon capture technology at industrial scale remains far below what the climate change mitigation, and possibly reversal, demands. The conventional explanation for this focuses on cost and technology maturity; and while both are real constraints, they are not the whole story.

Our research, “Chemistry Advances Driving Industrial Carbon Capture Technologies,” published in Nature Reviews Chemistry, was recently recognised by the Frontiers Planet Prize for identifying a more fundamental problem: the field has been asking the wrong question. Rather than asking “is this technology ready?”, the right question is “is this technology ready for this specific industrial application, under these operating conditions, in this regulatory and market environment?” The distinction matters enormously, as failing to make it has contributed directly to the slow pace of deployment.

A framework built for real-world problems and applications

Our research introduces a practical decision-making framework that, for the first time, connects three things that have typically been treated in isolation: what a given industrial process actually emits (that is, the concentration, temperature and pressure of its CO₂-laden exhaust); how five major families of carbon capture technology perform against each other across nine consistent criteria; and how mature the underlying chemistry of each approach really is, and for which applications it can realistically be developed further. By bringing these dimensions together in a single analysis, we give industry and policymakers something they have not previously had: a structured way to identify which carbon capture approach is genuinely suited to which industrial problem.

The research, which was co-authored with Professor Mercedes Maroto-Valer, Professor John M. Andresen and Dr. Jeannie Z. Y. Tan at Heriot-Watt University and João M. Uratani at the University of Sussex, also identifies a second dimension of the deployment gap: adoption readiness. Unfortunately, even when the right technology exists for the right application, deployment fails if the surrounding ecosystem (i.e., regulation, infrastructure, financing and public acceptance) has not been built. Funding technology research and development without simultaneously building this adoption ecosystem is a policy strategy likely to fail. Governments and industry must invest in both in parallel.

The rise of new technologies

Among our specific technology findings, electroswing carbon capture has emerged as a particularly important pathway. Unlike incumbent technologies that rely on thermal regeneration, which is highly energy intensive, electroswing operates at ambient temperatures and pressure and uses electricity rather than heat to drive the capture and release of CO₂ from the air. Furthermore, it is designed to capture very low concentrations of CO₂ and hence is a leading technology for atmospheric carbon removal. Currently, Verdox, a company spin-off from my alma mater, MIT, has already developed a fully electric CO₂ capture technology for both direct air capture and industrial point sources. The company reports energy use substantially below conventional thermally regenerated systems, including claims of up to 70% lower energy use and has demonstrated the technology on challenging low-CO₂ industrial streams such as aluminum-smelter off-gas. While these results are promising, the technology is still progressing through pilot and scale-up stages toward broader commercial deployment.

Impact at the scale the crisis demands

The practical value of our framework lies in its applicability to a wide range of environmental sustainability stakeholders. A steelmaker, a chemical company, an investor or a government policymaker can each use it to consider which technology is most relevant for their context and the chemistry advances that underpin these technologies.

The backdrop against which this work matters could scarcely be more urgent. Even if we were to stop CO₂ emissions from all human sources tomorrow, it may still not solve the climate change problem. What many don’t realise is that we would still have to do something about all of the CO₂ already emitted into the air, if we want to restore our planet’s CO₂ to preindustrial atmospheric levels. For several industries, carbon capture is the only viable path to achieving true net-zero operations, and it is not moving fast enough. Direct air capture and CO₂ mineralisation, both highlighted in our work, are key elements of the CO₂ removal equation.

For humanity, the cost of continuing to deploy the wrong technology in the wrong place, or of funding research and development without building the ecosystem needed to support commercialisation, is not measured in dollars. It is measured in gigatons of CO₂ that remain in the atmosphere and in environmental damages from global warming that cannot be undone.

What needs to happen next

We are proud of the role our research has played in advancing planetary boundary science from diagnosis to prescription, but the solution does not lie in science alone. We need to close the gap between what science already knows and what industry and policy have yet to act on. That gap is closeable. But the window is narrowing.

The framework and full findings are available in our paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry at www.nature.com/articles/s41570-025-00733-3.

About the author

By Dr Steve Griffiths, professor, vice chancellor for research at the American University of Sharjah and UAE National Champion, Frontiers Planet Prize 4th Edition