Investing in an Integrated System for Carbon Capture

United Kingdom | Monday, 21 September 2026
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Understanding how risk is shared and managed across CCUS projects can help investors evaluate long-term investment potential.

As carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects transition from concept to deployment, a new question is emerging alongside discussions of technology and policy: How should investors assess risk across a CCUS value chain?

For many investors, the challenge extends beyond understanding capture technology, pipeline infrastructure or storage geology in isolation. Increasingly, the focus is on how those elements work together as a system, and where accountability sits when they do not.

That distinction matters because many significant investment risks in CCUS emerge at interfaces between individual assets, particularly where ownership changes.

Investors invest in energy systems, not isolated assets.

What matters is knowing where to look. When risks and liabilities are allocated across a project, the most useful investment questions often arise where capture, transport and storage meet.

Shifting from asset thinking to system thinking

When speaking with project sponsors, lenders and investors, discussions often move beyond the asset directly in front of them.

An investor considering a power plant or industrial facility equipped with carbon capture is immediately interested in transportation and storage, asking:

Will those assets be available when a plant comes online?
What happens if a capture facility is operational before transportation infrastructure is ready?
Where does captured carbon dioxide (CO2) go in the meantime?
What is the CO2 quality standard for the transport and storage infrastructure system?

Likewise, investors focused on transportation or storage assets are asking questions about emitters:

Will sufficient volumes of CO2 enter the system over the long term?
What happens if a major industrial emitter leaves the region?
How reliable is the supply of captured carbon that ultimately supports the business case?

Significant risks emerge at interfaces

CCUS projects require multiple organisations, technologies and commercial arrangements to function as a coordinated whole. Carbon moves from an emitter to transportation infrastructure and ultimately into storage.

Multiple parties may own and operate each stage of the chain. Separate contracts govern each handoff. Different regulatory obligations may apply across the project lifecycle including requirements governing onshore capture and storage, offshore transportation and cross-border carbon transport.

Examples can include the quality of CO2 entering a transportation system, consistency of flow rates, timing mismatches between assets, liability allocation between stakeholders and commercial consequences when one element of a chain underperforms.

For example, if a capture facility is ready to operate before the transportation infrastructure is available, investors need to understand the wider commercial impact. That means looking at who absorbs the cost of the delay, what protections are built into the contracts and how the delay could affect the project’s economics.

Rish Chandarana

United Kingdom

Dominic Cook

United Kingdom

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Viewed individually, these may appear to be technical or operational challenges. Viewed collectively, they become investment risks.

The emergence of interface risks does not necessarily make CCUS projects less investable. Rather, it changes where investors focus their diligence. As the market matures, developers, operators and financiers are placing greater emphasis on defining responsibilities, structuring contracts and aligning incentives across the value chain.

These considerations will be familiar to infrastructure investors, but CCUS brings them together in a more connected setting. Risks need to be assessed across several linked assets, multiple stakeholders and commercial models that are still developing, often alongside regulatory structures that are also continuing to evolve.

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When technical risks become investment risks

Investors frequently discuss technical risk, regulatory risk, policy risk and commercial risk as separate categories. In practice, however, these risks are often interconnected. Ultimately, investors experience them through economics, schedules, performance, returns and repayment certainty.

One example is capital-cost uncertainty.

As CCUS projects develop, cost estimates can vary significantly. Contractors may be reluctant to provide similar performance guarantees they would offer for more mature technologies because they are operating with limited precedent themselves, with additional contingency allowances added to address perceived delivery and performance risks. That uncertainty is reflected in contracts, delivery strategies and project financing.

The same challenge can arise at asset interfaces. A turbine manufacturer may be comfortable providing guarantees for a standalone plant. Once a carbon capture system is integrated with that facility, guarantee structures may change because the interface introduces new variables and additional uncertainty.

This is where project delivery and investment decision-making converge. Understanding how technical uncertainties influence contracts, risk allocation and long-term performance is just as important as understanding the technology itself.

Similar projects, different investment outcomes

CCUS technologies are becoming better understood in many markets, but the policy, regulatory and commercial frameworks around them are still developing.

Different jurisdictions continue to take different approaches to permitting, government support, carbon pricing, transportation infrastructure, storage development and commercial risk sharing. Similar projects can therefore present varied investment profiles depending on where they are developed.

Jurisdictional differences influence interfaces between assets. Permitting frameworks, liability structures and carbon-market mechanisms all affect how risk is allocated across each CCUS ecosystem.

This is one reason experience from one market cannot always be applied directly to another. The underlying technology may remain largely unchanged, but the regulatory and commercial environment can significantly influence project risk and investment attractiveness. Understanding how technical, delivery and operational risks are managed in these environments can help build investor confidence.

Building confidence across the value chain

For both debt and equity investors, investability ultimately comes down to confidence.

Debt providers focus primarily on downside protection and repayment certainty. Equity investors evaluate both risk and opportunity, including future value creation and growth potential. While their perspectives differ, both groups need confidence that the entire system can perform over the long term.

Investor confidence may be supported by understanding how technical performance, project delivery, commercial arrangements, permitting requirements and regulatory frameworks work together across the value chain.

Many investors view opportunity in CCUS as significant. But successful investment decisions require more than confidence in capture technology, storage capacity or transportation infrastructure alone. They require confidence in how those assets connect, interact and perform as a system.

For investors evaluating CCUS opportunities, due diligence should extend beyond the performance of individual assets. More revealing questions sit at handoff points: How will carbon move through the system? Who assumes responsibility when performance varies? How are technical, commercial and regulatory risks allocated across participants?

Answers to those questions can provide important insight into a project’s long-term investment potential, alongside capture technology and storage resource assessment.

As the CCUS market matures, investors may increasingly favour projects that demonstrate not only strong assets, but strong integration across entire systems.

About the authors

Rish Chandarana, Director, Investment and Transaction Advisory, WSP

Rish Chandarana is an established commercial, technical and ESG infrastructure advisor with more than 20 years of expertise from working in the energy, renewables, transport and digital infrastructure sectors. He advises clients on the evaluation of project risks, identification of commercial growth opportunities and execution of strategies.

Dominic Cook, Technical Director, Energy Transition Advisory, WSP

Dominic Cook is an international energy transition specialist with more than 25 years of industry experience. He specialises in CCUS, thermal and renewable energy. Dominic is project lead on a WSP-led consortium acting as Technical Advisor to the UK Government on the delivery of its carbon capture, utilisation and storage programme. He also advises investors and lenders with technical due diligence on investments and divestments.

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