What CCS 1.0 Taught Us, and Where the Money Should Go Now | Grant Budge, CEO, PeroCycle

Host: Alex Cameron, Founder & CEO, Industrial Connect Group Ltd
Guest: Grant Budge, CEO, PeroCycle

Europe spent somewhere between eight and ten billion euros on hydrogen and CCS projects over the last decade. Grant Budge's rough calculation is that the same capital, deployed into carbon capture and utilisation, could have been removing three to six million tonnes of CO2 per year by now. Instead, we have a handful of projects that never crossed the line and an industry still arguing about infrastructure that doesn't exist. Grant was there for CCS v1.0. He knows why it stalled, and he has a clear view on what we keep getting wrong, as well as what could help drive the right capital to the right tech.

PeroCycle is CEO of a team converting CO2 into carbon monoxide on site, no pipeline, no offsite infrastructure, negative cost of carbon abatement on a DRI steel plant at current European energy prices. That's the claim. In this episode, Grant walks through how they got there, what could still break it, and why the deeper problem in industrial decarbonization isn't the technology at all.

Key Takeaways

1. Why large corporate balance sheets have been part of the problem, not the solution. The assumption that big companies with big balance sheets would lead deployment shaped a decade of policy. Grant explains why that logic kept failing, and what it meant for the technologies that got backed as a result.

2. The real reason hydrogen and CCS absorbed so much capital for so little output. It wasn't just bad technology choices. Grant traces it back to how the direction was set in the first place, and who was driving that conversation.

3. What a global database of validated decarbonization technologies would actually change. Right now, an industrial company trying to compare options has no independent source to go to. Grant makes the case for why that gap exists, who could fill it, and what it would have meant if it had existed ten years ago.

4. How PeroCycle moved from a cost of plus $50-60 per tonne of CO2 abated to minus $80. The engineering decisions behind that shift, and what they tell you about where most tech developers are leaving value on the table.

5. The stage gate that will make or break the business case. Scaling to the steel sector means a first-of-kind plant costing $250-300 million for a pre-revenue startup. Grant explains the strategy for getting there without that number killing the story with investors.

6. Why nickel and glass might matter more to PeroCycle right now than steel. The biggest market isn't always the right first market. Grant's thinking on this is worth hearing by anyone building deep tech for heavy industry.

7. What investors actually want to see from industrial tech companies at TRL 4-5. Grant has been on both sides of this conversation. His read on what separates companies that keep the conversation alive from those that get screened out early is direct and practical.

Links:

· Follow Alex Cameron on LinkedIn and find how to get involved with the membership and work of Decarb Connect

· Connect with Grant Budge, CEO, PeroCycle

· Find out more about Perocycle and its projects

· Join Alex and a network of hardtech investors and series B+ tech disruptors at Decarb TechInvest in Boston (September 2025)

· Sign up for our newsletter

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