Roughly 40 percent of the American workforce lives in manufacturing-heavy working-class towns, neither cities nor farming-dominated rural regions. Many industries that these communities rely on are among the hardest to decarbonize, such as refineries, as well as cement and steel plants.

Finding a clean technology solution is vital to sustaining local job markets while also reducing emissions. There is a growing acceptance that carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) is this solution.

Last fall’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by President Joe Biden — allocated about $12 billion for carbon capture and industrial emission reduction, directly supporting a massive increase in the CO2 transport and storage infrastructure industries. The inclusion of this funding in the legislation points to the strong political need to ensure that American industries adapt to a net zero economy — and the importance of CCUS to achieving this.

This is also the case globally. The International Energy Agency is clear that it will be impossible to reach net zero without accelerating the industrial adoption of CCUS; deployment needs to be 50 percent higher than current projections to reach global net zero goals.