The Carbon Catch: Making Decarbonization Work in the Real World

Two OMV employees talking on a rooftop with fjord, mountains, and modern buildings in the background in Norway.

Jul 14, 2025

5 min read

Related tags:

Carbon Capture Storage

Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 is one of the most urgent challenges of our time, especially for sectors built around carbon-intensive processes. For industries like cement, steel, and chemicals, carbon capture and storage (CCS) may be one of the only realistic routes to climate neutrality.

Why decarbonize?

Meeting the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is critical for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. These include rising sea levels that could subsume small island nations, devastating loss of biodiversity, and more frequent heatwaves, with wide-ranging consequences.

“You do not only have a lot of human suffering. There is also a financial cost: infrastructure is destroyed, assets are lost,” says Angelika Zartl-Klik, Senior Vice President for Low Carbon Business at OMV. “We need to reduce our CO₂ emissions.”

Aligning with the Paris Agreement means reaching net-zero emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases by 2050, also referred to as ‘climate neutrality’. This requires a rapid transformation of all systems, and especially energy, transport, construction, and food. For example, at least 98% of electricity must be generated by zero-carbon sources by 2050, requiring a massive scaling up of renewables to replace fossil-fuel-fired plants as they close.

Despite acknowledgement of the scale and speed of transformation required, we are not moving towards carbon neutrality quickly enough. Current national climate plans would result in a 2.6% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (compared to 2019 levels), but keeping on track to meet the Paris Agreement target would require a 43% decrease.

Sometimes, it’s not easy being green

One of the major challenges in reaching carbon neutrality concerns ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors like chemical manufacturing, steelmaking, and construction. What these sectors have in common is that their carbon-intensive processes have no straightforward sustainable alternatives (such as switching from coal to renewables for electricity generation). “It is in processing the raw material that the CO₂ gets out. There is nothing you can change if you want to produce cement or concrete,” says Zartl-Klik. “That’s why it’s called ‘hard-to-abate’ – if you want cement, if you want concrete, you will always have these emissions.”

To take it as an example, the construction industry consumes vast amounts of concrete – it is, in fact, the most manufactured material on Earth. Concrete is critical to our built environment, to continued economic and social development, and to climate adaptation (e.g.: for building flood control infrastructure). But it comes with a carbon footprint equivalent to around 4-8% of total global emissions.

“The main ingredient of concrete is cement – the strength comes from the cement. It’s also the ingredient that emits the CO₂,” says Jan Theulen, Director CCUS Business Development & Partnerships at Heidelberg Materials. Making Portland cement, the most common type of cement, requires several carbon-intensive steps that cannot be easily decarbonised. Clinker, the main ingredient of cement, is created by using an electrical furnace to heat limestone into calcium-oxide, a process which releases the CO₂ from the limestone.

"We simply owe it to our next generations to clean up as much as possible our CO2-footprint and guess what: it is exciting to make this happen!"

Jan Theulen, Director CCUS Business Development & Partnerships, Heidelberg Materials

 

A suite of solutions

Thankfully, these sectors are not impossible to decarbonize. There are ways to make the same product with lower or no greenhouse gas emissions, such as by finding efficiencies and switching to less-polluting fuels.

Theulen says that the construction industry has many decarbonization ‘levers’ available to pull. He explains that there are efficiencies to be made to reduce consumption of concrete, and also argues that the relatively low cost of concrete means developers could reasonably absorb the costs associated with making concrete more sustainably. “The cost of concrete for a whole building is on the order of magnitude of around 2%, but may be responsible for 50% of the embedded carbon,” says Jan. “If this material, due to its decarbonisation path, becomes more expensive, it does not mean that the building becomes unaffordable. If the cement price doubles and the building gets 2% more expensive, it is still achievable to develop such a building.”

There are also many scientists and engineers working on ingenious technological solutions for decarbonising concrete. These solutions include: finding suitable alternatives to limestone as an input; using other processes instead of heating to make clinker (e.g.: electrochemical processes that can be powered by renewables); or even harnessing microorganisms to make calcium carbonate rather than deriving it from hot limestone. However, all these solutions are hard to scale up at present. Theulen explains that, for instance, the materials that could be used to replace clinker while retaining high performance, such as waste incineration ashes, are very limited. “World demand for cement and concrete is at such a scale that there are no substitutes that can fill in any considerable amount of the market,” he says.

Under these circumstances, and to complement all of the other measures taken to scale the decarbonization of cement, it is mandatory to consider the possibility of removing carbon using CCS.

"If you look at the figures, CCUS is essential, and we also need CDR. Both are important options which require a functioning transport infrastructure to enable their potential for achieving climate neutrality."

Martin Frings, Head of Business Development CO2, OGE

A technological tool

For sectors that cannot fully decarbonise by 2050, their continued emissions must be balanced out by removal of an equivalent amount of carbon. This can be done through nature-based solutions such as afforestation but also through technological solutions – CCS typically refers to the latter.

In the simplest terms, CCS is a three-stage process in which CO₂ is captured, transported, and injected into secure underground structures for permanent storage. Capturing CO₂ from an industrial point source, such as the outlet of a blast furnace, means that emissions from hard-to-abate industries can be prevented from ever entering the atmosphere. Applied in this context, CCS could be one valuable element in the effort to reach carbon neutrality.

“If we want to reach carbon neutrality, carbon capture is unavoidable,” says Theulen. “Yet it's only one component in all our levers – we are keeping all our investments on reducing clinker and making cement [more sustainable] anyhow.”

At OMV, we recognize the urgency with which carbon emissions must be reduced – and the potential of CCS to help hard-to-abate industries in this effort. We have, therefore, set a strategic goal to provide CCS solutions for these industries: “We will only provide CCS capacity for hard-to-abate industries – these are very clear rules,” says Zartl-Klik.