Climate Impact:
Modular Solid-Sorbent Carbon Capture

Model Dashboard

Core metrics at a glance. Forecast year 2035 unless noted.

* Avoided emissions shown assume 1% market capture.

Projecting to Market Scale

The addressable market is the deployment of point-source capture across industries with concentrated CO2 streams, such as power generation, cement, steel, refining, and petrochemicals, estimated at about 15.2 billion USD by 2035. The figure reflects where capture is technically viable today: flue gas with high enough CO2 concentration that adsorption and regeneration are practical, rather than the more dilute streams that push costs sharply higher.

At a 1% market-capture scenario, applied to that 15.2 billion USD of deployment, modular solid-sorbent capture avoids roughly 1.76 Mt CO2e per year. This capture level is an illustrative assumption used to size the opportunity, not a prediction of how fast the market will move.

What ultimately determines the realized impact is not the capture rate but the energy and durability of the system. Regeneration heat drawn from fossil sources erodes the net benefit, while waste-heat integration and longer sorbent lifetimes widen it. The cost-effectiveness of about 86 dollars per tonne avoided is competitive within heavy industry, but it depends on sustained sorbent performance across many adsorption cycles and on secure storage or use of the captured CO2.

Key Findings

1. 1

   About 86 dollars to capture a tonne of CO2

   Measured against the cost of capture, modular solid-sorbent capture works out to roughly 86 dollars per tonne of CO2e abated, about 0.0116 tonnes for every dollar spent. Because the figure is a cost of abatement rather than a price tied to any one product, it carries across the mix of industries where point-source capture applies, and sits within the range that makes capture competitive against other ways of cutting industrial emissions.

2. 2

   Cuts the CO2 from those sources by about 79%

   Routing industrial flue gas through solid-sorbent capture removes roughly 79% of the CO2 those sources would otherwise release, net of the energy the capture process itself consumes. For hard-to-abate point sources such as cement kilns, steel, refining, petrochemicals, and fossil power, where process chemistry and high-temperature heat leave few alternatives, capturing the CO2 at the stack is one of the only routes to deep near-term cuts.

3. 3

   Solid sorbents avoid the liquid-amine penalties

   Porous solid sorbents, such as amine-functionalized adsorbents, zeolites, or metal-organic frameworks, adsorb CO2 in modular fixed-bed or structured units, then release it under thermal, pressure, or vacuum swing. Relative to large liquid gas-liquid amine contactors, the modular form factor shrinks plant footprint, enables waste-heat integration to lower regeneration energy, and avoids the solvent-degradation and solvent-waste streams of conventional amine scrubbing. Those are the levers that bring the cost per tonne down.

4. 4

   A 15.2 billion dollar capture market by 2035

   Point-source capture addressing concentrated CO2 streams represents an addressable market of about 15.2 billion USD in deployment by 2035. At a 1% market-capture scenario that corresponds to roughly 1.76 Mt CO2e avoided per year. This 1% capture level is an illustrative scaling assumption, not a forecast.

5. 5

   Cost and impact hinge on regeneration energy and sorbent durability

   The cost and abatement figures assume the captured CO2 is durably stored and that regeneration heat does not reintroduce large emissions. Net outcomes depend on sorbent lifetime and degradation, the source and efficiency of regeneration energy, and integration at industrial scale. The solution-side intensity here is an early-stage, AI-generated estimate not yet expert-validated, so it should be read as indicative rather than settled.

Methodology & Data Provenance

Data Quality Assessment

Companies working to create this future

References & Resources

• Mohammed, R. K., & Farzaneh, H. (2023). Life Cycle Environmental Impacts Assessment of Post-Combustion Carbon Capture for Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plant in Iraq. Energies, 16(3), 1545.
• Sher, F., et al. (2025). Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage technology to achieve net zero emissions: A review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 210, 115229.
• IEA (2021). Is carbon capture too expensive?
• Astute Analytica (2024). Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) Market to Reach US$51.80 Billion by 2050.
• Koi Data & Methodology Overview
• Full Model Datasheet (Koi platform)

Published by Rho Impact. Data sourced from the Koi Data Lake. Last updated June 2026.