Decarbonisation Technology August 2026 Issue

Multisector CCS hubs in Southeast Asia

As CCS hubs shift from strategy to implementation, data-driven subsurface workflows can connect sources to storage, enhancing deployment efficiency

Anabelle Valdez Belltree

S outheast Asia’s decarbonisation increasingly hinges on multi-sector carbon capture and storage (CCS) hubs. Indonesia and Vietnam alone emit hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ from cement and coal, two sectors that dominate industrial emissions while sharing fuel supply chains, geographic concentration, and enabling infrastructure. Mapping indicates that four CCS corridors in Vietnam could capture up to 50 Mt per year, cutting cement emissions by 46% and national emissions by 15% (Lau & Tsai, 2024) . In Indonesia, Java-Sumatra clusters could add a further 10-15 Mt/yr from cement plants and select coal units by pairing them with nearby depleted fields and saline aquifers (Bhaskara & Sidemen, 2025) (Norton Rose Fulbright, 2025) (Pertamina, 2025). Taken together, these corridors represent the fastest path to scale: shared pipelines, shipping, and storage transform stranded assets into investable decarbonisation infrastructure. Proximity and infrastructure advantage Much of the cement and coal capacity in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) already sits within 200-300 km of storage-ready geology. That proximity materially lowers transport costs and supports high-capture designs already mapped in Vietnam and screened in Indonesia. Depleted oil and gas fields offer an immediate advantage: they have known injectivity, proven caprock integrity, and lower pressure regimes, while nearshore saline aquifers provide long-term scale at the cost of additional appraisal, pressure management, and robust measuring, monitoring

and verification (MMV). Aggregating emitters into shared hubs amortises these costs across sectors, using the same economic logic that underpinned bankable CCS hubs in the North Sea and Australia. The constraint is not theoretical storage capacity, but subsurface certainty. Southeast Asia may have abundant storage potential on paper, but subsurface data remains uneven. In practice, that shifts the priority from identifying the biggest theoretical stores to matching industrial clusters with the nearest viable “ Much of the cement and coal capacity in ASEAN already sits within 200-300 km of storage-ready geology. That proximity materially lowers transport costs and supports high- capture designs already mapped in Vietnam and screened in Indonesia ” reservoirs and advancing shared appraisal programmes at corridor level. As a result, investors focus less on gigatonnes on paper and more on site-specific fundamentals: injectivity, containment, and pressure behaviour. Against this backdrop, Indonesia’s data-rich, depleted fields in the Java Sea and Sunda-Asri provide a clear head start, whereas Vietnam’s basins, such as Song Hong, can only scale once targeted appraisal reduces uncertainty. In practice, the fastest way to advance both is through coordinated source-to-sink matching, pairing cement and coal clusters with the nearest viable storage and progressing shared