You’re solving the wrong problem

Hi {{first_name}} and happy Wednesday,

Imagine a technology that captures 90% of the CO₂ coming out of a ship's engine.

Sounds like a win.

Now imagine that running that technology requires burning more fuel. Which produces more CO₂. Which the system then partially captures. Which requires more energy to capture.

By the time you account for that cycle and the fact that the system gets throttled down in port during rough weather and transient conditions, your 90% can quietly become 40–55% in practice.

Still a win, maybe. But a very different one.

That gap between the number announced and the number that actually matters is what Transport & Environment (T&E) asked us to investigate. They wanted to know whether onboard carbon capture could be a credible tool for shipping decarbonization. Not in theory. In practice.

What we found was more complicated than the headline suggested.

Every technology has a headline number. It's the number that appears in press releases, pitch decks, and conference presentations. It's the number measured under the best conditions, at the moment the system is performing exactly as designed.

That number is useful. But it's not the one you should be making decisions with.

The decision-relevant number is what the technology delivers after real-world conditions are applied: the energy it consumes, the downtime it accumulates, the performance it loses when conditions aren't ideal. In our assessment, working through those adjustments turned a headline capture rate into a very different picture of actual annual impact.

Whatever you're evaluating, find the net number. It's almost always available if you know to ask for it. And it's almost always lower than the one being advertised.

Once you have the net number, the next question is whether the surrounding system can actually support it.

Most technologies don't fail in isolation. They fail at the handoffs: the points where one system has to connect to another, where infrastructure has to exist that hasn't been built yet, where standards have to be agreed upon that are still being written.

In this case, captured CO₂ only becomes creditable if it completes an entire downstream journey: conditioning, onboard storage, offloading, transfer, and verified delivery to a permanent storage site. Each of those steps requires infrastructure that is still nascent in most of the world.

When you evaluate a technology, map the full chain it depends on. Ask not just whether the core mechanism works, but whether every handoff that follows has what it needs to function.

The bottleneck to scale is rarely the thing getting all the attention.

In onboard carbon capture, the debate centers on capture performance: how efficiently a system can separate CO₂ from exhaust. But our analysis pointed to a different constraint entirely: the port infrastructure, storage access, and verification frameworks that have to exist before captured CO₂ can mean anything beyond the ship itself.

When you're assessing whether a technology can scale, look past the component being funded and announced. Ask what the surrounding system requires, and whether those requirements are being addressed with the same urgency.

The visible innovation gets the investment. The surrounding system decides whether it works.

By the end of the engagement, the client gained: