Europe’s carbon capture and storage sector has reached its turning point, but has only partly crossed it. Since 2025, Northern Lights in Norway and Greensand in Denmark have been storing CO₂ shipped from emitters in several countries, showing that shared, open-access infrastructure can work on commercial terms. Yet the pipeline backbones designed to take CCS to scale, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, are still under construction, and inside the EU, operating injection capacity remains below 0.5 million tonnes a year, against a 2030 target of 50 million. 

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This white paper maps 15 projects across the North Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean and sorts them by how close each is to operating: from today’s ship-based storage hubs, to the Dutch backbone and its cross-border wings into Germany and Belgium, to the emerging BECCS corridor in the Baltic and new storage hubs in Southern Europe. It also examines what is holding projects back before final investment decisions are taken, and what the EU’s evolving policy framework means for emitters, developers and investors.