Europe is investing heavily in industrial decarbonization — and the EU Innovation Fund has quietly become one of the clearest indicators of where the region’s carbon management landscape is heading. With billions of Euros committed to large-scale climate technologies, it acts as a shortlist of projects that can meaningfully move the needle.
CCUS is now a prominent feature in that portfolio. And when we analyze the Innovation Fund through CaptureMap’s bottom-up, facility-level data model, a sharper picture emerges — one that goes beyond announcements and reveals what’s actually happening on the ground.
Patterns start appearing: which industries are moving first, which countries are setting the pace, how the CO₂ will be handled, and where cross-border flows are beginning to form.
Here’s what the latest EU Innovation Fund rounds tell us about Europe’s accelerating CCUS trajectory.
Table of Contents
What kinds of CCUS projects receive Innovation Fund support?
One thing is clear: Europe is no longer just funding niche pilots. The Innovation Fund is putting money behind industrial-scale capture projects with the potential for real emissions impact.
The challenge? The Innovation Fund dataset is messy. Across just over 300 projects, there are 38 different technology pathways with some reference to carbon capture — often overlapping, inconsistently named, or only implicitly mentioning CO₂ handling. Several projects include multiple capture points or don’t disclose their exact locations, while others blend capture with transport and storage.
This is exactly the type of fragmentation CaptureMap was built to solve.
Using CaptureMap’s standardized segmentation, AI-driven cleaning, and bottom-up facility matching, we connect each eligible Innovation Fund project back to ground-truthed emitters. Even with incomplete or inconsistent source data, CaptureMap makes it possible to identify which facilities are actually progressing toward capture.
After filtering for confirmed capture elements, removing pure transport/storage projects, and handling multi-facility projects like CARBON HUB CPT01 or Kairos@C, we are left with 50 facilities across Europe linked to funded capture-related projects.
In here, three important notes:
- The list of 50 projects includes 3 projects for which status remains uncertain — SHARC, HySkies, and AIR — all listed as terminated by the Innovation Fund but not always consistently confirmed in public sources as actually terminated. We include them for now.
- Note that 5 of the 50 facilities are identified but without capture capacity specified. We have still included them in the discussions below and they will count in the # of project discussions, but will naturally not influence the capture capacity figures.
- Note also that there are 6 additional projects (outside of the 50) that seem to include capture, but for which we’re not able to identify the sites. These are not included in the discussions below. Why? Because we don’t know where to place them or segment them.
Which industrial emission segments dominate?
Looking across these 50 facilities, a clear trend emerges: Europe is prioritizing hard-to-abate industrial sectors, fully aligned with CaptureMap’s segmentation framework. Note that we’re tracking where the CO2 is sourced from, meaning an e-SAF project that sources CO2 from a pulp site, like ReSTart in France, comes under the pulp category.
- Nearly half of the funded capture projects come from the cement and lime sector — unsurprising given the unavoidable process emissions and limited alternatives for deep decarbonization.
- Refineries (14%) and low-carbon hydrogen (10%) come next. High-concentration CO₂ streams and established industrial clusters make them strong early candidates for capture.
- Waste-to-energy and pulp & paper projects also appear, signaling the rising importance of biogenic CO₂ for negative-emissions strategies.
- Sectors like iron & steel or power make the list, although barely.
This alignment between Innovation Fund priorities and CaptureMap’s standardized segmentation makes it easy to compare apples to apples across Europe’s industrial landscape.
Utilisation vs. storage: how is the CO₂ actually handled?
Europe’s CCUS strategy is unfolding along two parallel tracks: geological storage (mostly) in the North Sea region, and CO₂ utilisation across inland Europe. The Innovation Fund portfolio shows a strong skew toward storage.
Europe’s CCUS strategy is unfolding along two parallel tracks: geological storage (mostly) in the North Sea region, and CO₂ utilisation across inland Europe. The Innovation Fund portfolio shows a strong skew toward storage.
- 26.6 mtpa of funded capacity is intended for geological storage
- 4.9 mtpa for utilisation
- 0.8 mtpa for hybrid utilisation + storage schemes
That means storage-bound volumes outnumber utilisation by a factor of six. The geography generally supports this split, although there are local exceptions.
Storage projects cluster in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and parts of Italy and Greece, where offshore reservoirs and shipping infrastructure are advancing quickly. Utilisation is more prevalent in Central and Southern Europe, where access to storage is less mature and e-fuels/chemical pathways play a larger role.
Many projects explicitly plan cross-border CO₂ transport — something CaptureMap highlights uniquely through its Facility Details pages. And with our upcoming transport and storage modules, we’ll be able to show you more.
Total capture capacity under development
Looking across funding windows, Europe is now adding several million tonnes of new capture capacity per year through Innovation Fund projects alone. Cement and lime again dominate the volume, reflecting both their large process emissions and strong policy alignment.
But the chart tells an important story: The distribution of funded capture capacity does not directly match Europe’s highest-emitting sectors.
Coal and lignite — still the largest single contributor to industrial CO₂ emissions — don’t feature in Innovation Fund capture awards. Hydrogen, refineries, chemicals, and waste-to-energy follow, each with meaningful but relatively modest totals.
In short, there’s much more work to be done across sectors in Europe before the CCUS development can be called full steam ahead.
Geographical distribution: who’s leading?
Everyone loves a bit of country-to-country rivalry — and the Innovation Fund data provides one. According to the chart below, France and Belgium currently lead with nine funded capture-related projects each. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy follow with four apiece.
This distribution reflects a mix of:
- robust national funding frameworks
- mature industrial hubs
- early participation in EU-level CCUS initiatives
- strong industry-government alignment
Yet when we overlay these awards with CaptureMap’s full emissions database, it becomes clear that several large emitters — especially in Central and Eastern Europe — remain largely untapped for future capture rounds.
The opportunity space is still enormous.
How Innovation Fund CCUS Projects Have Evolved Over Time
Looking across five Innovation Fund calls, the CCUS landscape is clearly maturing. The charts show not just shifts in which sectors win funding (see first chart on # of projects), but a steady rise in the scale of capture being proposed (see second chart on capture capacity).
Project numbers rose, peaked, then consolidated. Capture-related projects grew from ~8 in 2020 to 13 in 2023, before dipping again in 2024. Some key patterns:
- 2023 is the high point for both number and diversity of projects.
- 2024 sees fewer projects, more targeted — dominated by cement and pulp.
This reflects perhaps a broader market shift from experimentation to more strategic deployments. Capture capacity is scaling faster than project count. While project numbers fluctuate, capacity tells a clearer story: Europe is ramping up.
- Early calls (2020–2022): 4–7 mtpa each
- 2023: a jump to ~10 mtpa
- 2024: ~5.5 mtpa
We also observe a dip in 2024 in projects and capture capacity, but this is also in part due to projects not yet being identified yet, so it’s too early to call whether this is a lasting trend.
Except for in 2020, cement and lime anchor the projects every year. But 2023 also introduces major growth in:
- Hydrogen (largest single-year increase)
- Waste-to-energy and iron & steel, both more prominent than before
We see signs that Europe is moving from early pilots to industrial deployment — with Innovation Fund data making that trajectory visible.
So what does this tell us about Europe’s CCUS direction?
Across all the noise, three clear trends emerge:
- Industrial scale is now the priority. Europe is funding real capture capacity at real industrial facilities — not pilot plants. This marks the transition from “innovation” to deployment.
- Hard-to-abate sectors are moving first. Cement and lime dominate, followed by refineries, hydrogen, chemicals, and waste-to-energy. These are the sectors where CCUS is not optional.
- Europe is just getting started. Fifty facilities and roughly 30 mtpa of planned capture capacity is significant — but compared to Europe’s industrial emissions baseline, it’s still the early innings.
For developers, suppliers, investors, and policymakers, these trends are unmistakable: CCUS in Europe has shifted from interesting to inevitable. And the Innovation Fund is accelerating that shift.
Final thoughts: how CaptureMap turns EU Innovation Fund data into market intelligence
Behind every Innovation Fund award is a real facility with real emissions, real timelines, and real infrastructure constraints. Making it onto the Innovation Fund list is already a major achievement — but the real challenge is what comes next: moving more projects from funding awarded to final investment decision, and ultimately to operational capture capacity.
This is where CaptureMap becomes indispensable. By grounding Innovation Fund announcements in verified facility-level data, CaptureMap helps industry players both identify new candidates for future funding rounds and validate the business cases required to advance toward FID.
With CaptureMap, you can quickly understand:
- How capture capacities compare across industrial sectors
- Whether CO₂ is headed for utilisation, storage, or both
- Where cross-border CO₂ flows are starting to emerge
- Which regions are accelerating — and which are falling behind
- Who are the actors involved
CaptureMap helps turn a fragmented set of Innovation Fund announcements into industry-standard CCUS market intelligence — the kind you can use to screen opportunities, benchmark strategy, and make confident decisions.
If you want to explore Innovation Fund projects in your region or sector — or understand how they stack up against Europe’s broader emissions landscape — book a CaptureMap demo
