From Pilots to Platforms: Why India’s CCUS Moment Has Arrived

The opportunity before India is significant. Unlike early movers in Europe and North America, India has the advantage of designing CCUS ecosystems from first principles. It can build them integrated rather than incremental, modular rather than bespoke, and cost-efficient rather than over-engineered.

February 26, 2026. By News Bureau

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Energy transition

Anirudh Saraswat

TrueRE Oriana Power Ltd.

India’s energy transition is entering a decisive phase. The first decade of decarbonisation was rightly focused on scaling renewable power, improving efficiency, and electrifying end-uses wherever possible. That chapter was about electrons. The next chapter will be about molecules - carbon, hydrogen and synthetic fuels, and it will determine whether India can decarbonise its industrial base without compromising growth, competitiveness or energy security.

It is in this context that the Department of Science and Technology’s CCUS Roadmap 2025 deserves serious attention. Not as a niche climate document, but as a blueprint for a new industrial opportunity. The roadmap signals a subtle but important shift in thinking: carbon is no longer viewed only as an environmental externality to be minimised, but as a strategic input that can be managed, transformed, and, in some cases, monetised.

Why Electrification Alone Is Not Enough

The limits of electrification are already visible. While renewable power has made remarkable progress, several sectors central to India’s economy, like cement, steel, refining, chemicals, fertilisers, aviation and shipping, cannot be fully decarbonised through electrons alone. These industries depend on high-temperature processes, chemical reactions and energy-dense fuels that electricity, at least in its current form, cannot economically replace.

For these hard-to-abate sectors, CCUS is not a transitional compromise; it is a structural necessity. The DST roadmap’s emphasis on retrofitting existing industrial assets rather than replacing them prematurely reflects a pragmatic understanding of India’s development realities. It recognises that decarbonisation must work with the country’s industrial base, not against it.

CCUS and Green Hydrogen: Twin Pillars of Decarbonisation

Equally important is the roadmap’s implicit recognition that CCUS does not exist in isolation. One of the most common misconceptions in climate discourse is that carbon capture and green hydrogen represent competing pathways. In reality, they are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

CCUS without utilisation remains largely a cost centre, while green hydrogen without anchored demand struggles to achieve scale and bankability. When combined, however, they unlock a powerful set of possibilities. Captured CO₂ becomes a feedstock, green hydrogen becomes the reducing agent and energy source, and together they enable synthetic fuels such as e-methanol and sustainable aviation fuel. These fuels are among the very few viable decarbonisation options for long-distance transport and certain industrial applications.

From Waste Management to Carbon Value Chains

Historically, CCUS was framed as a form of waste management, an expensive, defensive measure designed to mitigate environmental harm. That framing no longer holds. Globally, we are witnessing the emergence of carbon as a managed resource within structured supply chains.

Captured CO₂ is increasingly treated as an input into fuels, chemicals and materials, while permanent geological storage provides a credible pathway for residual emissions that cannot be economically utilised. The future lies not in choosing between utilisation and storage, but in building integrated carbon management systems where both coexist. India’s CCUS roadmap moves in this direction by acknowledging multiple end-states for captured carbon rather than prescribing a single pathway.

The Hub Model: The Only Path to Economic Scale

The real constraint on CCUS today is not technology maturity. Capture technologies, transport solutions and storage methodologies are well understood and improving steadily. The binding constraint is economics, and economics can only be solved at scale.

This is where the hub model becomes decisive. Cluster-based CCUS and hydrogen hubs dramatically reduce unit costs by allowing shared infrastructure, common transport and storage networks, centralised hydrogen production and integrated synthesis facilities. They also simplify regulation, monitoring and certification.

For India, the hub model is not just desirable; it is inevitable. Industrial corridors in Gujarat, the eastern steel belt and coastal port regions combine high concentrations of emissions with renewable energy potential and export infrastructure. These geographies are natural candidates for integrated CCUS-hydrogen hubs. The DST roadmap’s openness to clustering and platform-based deployment reflects a clear understanding that atomised projects will not deliver the scale India needs.

From Pilots to Platforms: Integration as the Strategic Imperative

This brings us to the central strategic insight of the roadmap, and perhaps its most underappreciated one. The next phase of CCUS will not be determined by incremental improvements in capture efficiency or storage costs. It will be determined by integration.

Pilot projects serve an important purpose, but they do not create markets. Platforms do. Platforms integrate emitters, technology providers, infrastructure developers, financiers and policymakers into a single operating framework with aligned incentives and shared risk. Without such integration, CCUS will remain fragmented, slow and expensive.

India now needs orchestration more than experimentation. The DST roadmap opens the door by articulating a national vision. The next step is to operationalise that vision through mechanisms that bring stakeholders together, create long-term visibility and enable coordinated execution.

Financing the Carbon Economy

Technology alone will not deliver scale. Targeted policy and market enablers are essential, particularly in the early stages.

Finance will play a decisive role in this transition. CCUS projects are capital-intensive and long-dated. They require confidence in policy stability, carbon accounting frameworks and offtake visibility.

Early-stage support through viability gap funding, concessional finance and risk-sharing instruments will be essential, but so will the creation of market signals that reward permanent abatement and low-carbon fuels. Clear standards for measurement, reporting and verification, along with internationally credible certification frameworks, will be critical if India is to participate meaningfully in global carbon and e-fuel markets.

A Strategic Opportunity, Not a Compliance Burden

The opportunity before India is significant. Unlike early movers in Europe and North America, India has the advantage of designing CCUS ecosystems from first principles. It can build them integrated rather than incremental, modular rather than bespoke, and cost-efficient rather than over-engineered.

Done right, CCUS can support industrial competitiveness, enhance energy security and create new export opportunities, all while advancing climate goals.

At TrueRE Oriana Power, we are deeply optimistic about this trajectory. We see carbon not merely as something to be avoided, but as something that can be responsibly captured, transformed and valued within a well-designed system. In that sense, CO₂ is the new gold, and TrueRE is here to capture it.

The Road Ahead

India’s CCUS journey is no longer a question of if, but of how fast and how well. If the country can move decisively from pilots to platforms, carbon capture will not just complement the energy transition. It will become one of its most powerful growth engines.

- Anirudh Saraswat, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, TrueRE Oriana Power Ltd.