Europe’s potential carbon capture and storage project pipeline is losing steam in General Energy News 12/06/2026 The number of new carbon capture and storage (CCS) project announcements in Europe has fallen sharply in the last three years. A string of cancellations in 2025 underscores the economic and technical hurdles that CCS projects face in reaching final investment decision. IEEFA expects to see continued weakness in new project announcements and more cancellations. This raises questions about whether CCS can deliver at the scale European decarbonisation targets require. Europe’s pipeline of potential CCS projects significantly increased between 2018 and 2023, when 317 projects supporting capture, transport and storage were announced. EU policies such as the European Climate Law — which makes climate neutrality by 2050 legally binding — and Fit for 55 supported this boom in activity. The policies advocate for increased use of CCS to support EU climate neutrality. This was coupled with a significant rise in the price of carbon across Europe at the time, namely through the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), which moved from €5–10 in 2017 to peaks above €100 in 2023. This made purchasing ETS emission allowances increasingly expensive and provided a clear economic incentive for polluters to avoid these rising costs with CCS. In addition, a series of CCS public funding and state support mechanisms were announced from 2018, including the EU Innovation Fund, Important Projects of Common European Interest and Carbon Contracts for Difference, as well as national subsidy schemes in the UK, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark. The introduction of hub-and-spoke industrial clusters from early 2020 removed early CCS project barriers by enabling carbon capture projects to share pipelines and storage hubs. Around this time, CCS became central to blue hydrogen production strategies, and regulatory clarity started to improve. The penny drops More recently there has been a marked