The CCUS Data Gap: Why Investment Teams Are Flying Blind

There are over 500 carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects at various stages of development globally. Governments have committed hundreds of billions in subsidies — the US alone has allocated over $12 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act's 45Q tax credit. Major oil companies are staking portions of their net-zero strategies on it. And yet, if you're an investment team trying to underwrite a CCUS asset today, you are largely flying blind. The Data That Doesn't Exist Ask any analyst at an infrastructure PE fund or energy major what plant-level CCUS data they rely on and you'll get the same answer: a mix of press releases, company filings, IEA project announcements, and whatever a consultant scraped together last quarter. The established energy intelligence and commodity data platforms — built decades ago for oil, gas, and power markets — have no plant-level coverage for CCUS. Not a single one can tell you — at the asset level — the capture capacity, technology type, carbon intensity, regulatory status, operator, and off-take structure of a specific facility. This isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a structural problem for the entire asset class. When investment teams can't answer basic questions about an asset — What is the actual capture rate? What 45Q tier does it qualify for? How does its carbon intensity compare to the 10 closest comps? — the cost of capital goes up, deals take longer, and capital that should be flowing into decarbonization doesn't. Why the Gap Exists Legacy data platforms were built for legacy energy. Incumbent commodity intelligence platforms were built for oil and gas reserves, traded commodities, and fuel price reporting. CCUS didn't exist at scale when these platforms were architected. And because the asset class has only recently reached the scale where institutional capital is paying serious attention, the data infrastructure never caught up. The result: incumbents have retrofitted CCUS coverage as an afterthought — usually at the company or project level, rarely at the plant level, and almost never with the granularity that a serious investment underwriting requires. Plant-level data is the difference between knowing that Company X has a CCUS program and knowing that Facility Y in the Permian Basin is capturing 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year at a carbon intensity of 22kg CO₂/MMBtu, with a 20-year storage agreement and a 45Q IRS certification active since Q3 2023. The first is a press release. The second is investable intelligence. The Compounding Problem: Carbon Markets The data gap doesn't stop at plant operations. It compounds into carbon markets. CCUS projects generate carbon credits. Those credits have a value that fluctuates with carbon prices — EU ETS, RGGI, California's LCFS, the voluntary markets. A change in carbon price can shift a project's IRR by several percentage points. But today, the connection between a specific CCUS plant, its credit generation, its registry status,