Heavy industry accounts for nearly 70% of industrial carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. That single number frames the deployment gap facing carbon capture: the chemistry works, but most of it was never designed for the environments where the emissions actually occur.

The workhorse of current commercial capture is amine-based solvent scrubbing. These systems operate best at relatively low temperatures and under controlled conditions — a profile that fits gas processing and some power applications, but clashes with the reality of cement kilns, steel mills, industrial boilers and chemical plant stacks. Retrofitting amine systems into hot, contaminated flue gas streams requires extensive cooling, cleaning and conditioning. Operators must bolt an entirely new operating model onto existing infrastructure, and valuable energy is lost along the way.

For industries optimizing margins and uptime, those trade-offs decide whether a capture project clears the economic bar or never leaves the starting line.

Where solvents hit their limits

Amine solvents have advanced the field and remain well suited to lower-temperature applications. But they are energy-hungry: the more energy the capture system consumes, the more CO₂ it generates, compounding the problem it is meant to solve. Energy efficiency is therefore central to the economics of deployment.

The chemistry itself imposes constraints. Organic solvents degrade when exposed to heat, oxygen and contaminants common in industrial exhaust — sulphur compounds, nitrogen oxides, particulates. Organic molecules can also vaporize and escape into the environment. Degradation drives replacement costs, raises operational risk and causes unplanned downtime. Even with improved solvent formulations, the foundational architecture remains constrained by these properties.

Designing for the stack, not the lab

A new generation of capture technologies inverts the approach: design the chemistry around industrial operating conditions rather than forcing facilities to adapt. Several companies and research institutions are developing high-temperature capture using inorganic materials — molten salts, solid alkaline earth oxides such as calcium oxide and magnesium oxide, and mixed metal oxide systems. Calcium looping and Mantel's molten borate technology represent this shift, according to the company's technical materials.

These materials behave more like rock or lava than fragile organic molecules. They can withstand harsh industrial environments without breaking down, and they operate at the temperatures heavy industry already runs.

Where the fit is clearest

The advantage is most pronounced where heat is already central to operations: power stations, chemical plants, industrial boilers, steel mills and cement kilns. Oil sands operations — which depend on large volumes of steam for extraction — are a strong fit, since a high-temperature process can capture CO₂ at operating temperature while feeding recovered heat back into the process as steam. Pulp and paper mills running large boilers for chip heating and product drying present a similar profile.

Power generation is another frontier, driven in part by data center demand. Google has backed power purchase agreements with natural gas plants fitted with carbon capture and storage for Midwest data centers, Reuters reported in October 2025. High-temperature capture can integrate into a range of generation environments without disrupting operations, and more of this activity is expected.

Separating built capacity from the pledge

Both the IEA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have concluded repeatedly that carbon capture deployment must increase dramatically to meet global climate goals — yet actual buildout remains far behind what those trajectories require. The distinction matters for anyone tracking this sector: announced projects using next-generation chemistry are not operating capacity, and the technology names cited here — calcium looping, molten borate capture — are at earlier stages than incumbent amine systems.

The industry has spent decades chasing incremental gains: better solvents, marginal efficiency improvements, modest cost reductions. Those improvements matter, but they have not shifted the cost curve enough to make large-scale adoption compelling. Systems engineered to match industrial operating conditions change the energy penalty, and when energy efficiency improves, cost savings follow — a structural shift in the business case rather than a marginal one.

What decides what happens next: whether high-temperature inorganic capture systems move from pilot-stage demonstration to bankable retrofits on cement kilns, steel mills and gas-fired power plants — and whether the capture rates and cost per tonne they claim survive contact with real flue gas at scale.