India launches national CCUS R&D roadmap targeting cement, power, and steel

India's Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser launched a national carbon capture, utilisation, and storage R&D roadmap on December 9 2025, targeting hard-to-abate cement, power, and steel sectors under the ₹1 lakh-crore RDI funding framework. Firms in these sectors must now evaluate CCUS readiness as the roadmap embeds the technology into India's net-zero-by-2070 strategy.

India unveiled a national research and development roadmap to accelerate deployment of carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) technologies, part of its commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070. The roadmap was launched by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser on December 9 2025, targeting hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, power generation, and steel. It proposes coordinated action and public-private collaboration, backed by a government-funded R&D investment pool under the ₹1 lakh-crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) framework, building on five pilot testbeds for carbon capture announced earlier in 2025 in the cement sector.

The roadmap directly affects firms in the cement, steel, and power sectors, which account for a significant share of India's greenhouse-gas emissions and are hard to decarbonise otherwise. Government-backed funding and public-private partnerships are designed to ease the burden on individual firms, offering smaller and mid-size industries a channel to deploy CCUS. The five existing pilot testbeds in the cement sector will feed into the broader national strategy, providing shared infrastructure, skilled human capital, and regulatory standards for safe and effective deployment across industries.

Firms in cement, steel, and power should evaluate CCUS readiness at the earliest, anticipating a phase-wise rollout: immediate actions establishing demonstration projects and regulatory guidelines, medium-term scaling of CO2 transport and storage infrastructure and logistics, and long-term integration of CCUS at scale in industrial operations. Investors and stakeholders should treat CCUS-linked projects as ESG signals for long-term viability, and monitor how alignment with global best practices helps Indian industries remain competitive under rising international climate-and-sustainability standards.

Key figure — Funding framework: ₹1 lakh-crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) pool