---
title: "What carbon capture costs (research idea)"
description: "Carbon capture and storage, carbon removal and direct air capture appear on about 34 recent papers, mostly in economics, while governments now pay large subsidies for them. How much does a tonne captured actually cost in the projects that run, and which uses are worth the subsidy?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/what-carbon-capture-costs
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/what-carbon-capture-costs.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "What carbon capture costs (research idea): Carbon capture and storage, carbon removal and direct air capture appear on about 34 recent papers, mostly in economics, while governments now pay large subsidies for them."
date: "2026-10-26"
updated: "2026-10-26"
status: "seed"
tags: ["economics", "climate", "energy"]
keywords: ["carbon capture and storage", "carbon dioxide removal", "direct air capture"]
---

# What carbon capture costs

Carbon capture and storage, carbon removal and direct air capture appear on about 34 recent papers, mostly in economics, while governments now pay large subsidies for them. How much does a tonne captured actually cost in the projects that run, and which uses are worth the subsidy?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, about 34 papers carry a carbon-capture, carbon-removal or direct-air-capture keyword (25 in economics journals): "carbon capture and storage" on 19, "carbon capture utilization and storage" on 8, "carbon dioxide removal" on 6, "direct air capture" on 2. Subsidies such as the US 45Q credit and the first commercial storage hubs in Europe have turned capture from a modelling assumption into a set of real projects with costs.

## Questions

- In operating projects, how much CO2 is captured relative to design capacity, and what is the realized cost per tonne stored?
- Which sources (ethanol plants, gas processing, cement, power) capture most cheaply, and does the subsidy go mostly to the cheapest, which might have been captured anyway?
- How do the climate models that assume large-scale capture by 2050 compare with the build-out actually under way?

## Data that could help

Project capacity and injection reports (regulatory filings, the Global CCS Institute database), subsidy claims, and cost disclosures from operators.

## Next step

Compile design and reported capture rates for every operating capture project and compare realized costs per tonne with the assumptions in widely used climate scenarios.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| carbon capture and storage | 3 | #776 | 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 3, 0, 2, 3, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 0, 2, 5, 3, 1, 3, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 3, 1 | 55 |
| carbon dioxide removal | 1 | #2881 | 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 3, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0 | 17 |
| direct air capture | 1 | #2881 | 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 | 6 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). What carbon capture costs. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/what-carbon-capture-costs

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-what-carbon-capture-costs,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {What carbon capture costs},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/what-carbon-capture-costs}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).