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Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) involves the capture and use of CO 2 as a resource to create valuable products. The economic viability of CCU technologies is crucial for its implementation in real life. The competitiveness of various CCU technologies has been investigated frequently resulting in a variety of economic feasibility studies and economic indicators. This study performs a tutorial review, in which practical guidance is given on the implementation of TEAs for chemical CCU technologies. The tutorial review will critically examine the economic feasibility studies that have been performed in this eld and will advise how these studies can be improved in the future. A thorough review of the literature set is performed, in which we evaluate the quality of the economic feasibility studies in the literature set by comparing these studies to the guidelines from Zimmermann et al. ( 2020). The ve phases of an exhaustive TEA are (I) goal and scope, (II) data inventory, (III) calculation of indicators, (IV) interpretation, and (V) writing the report. We evaluate the implementation of these ve phases in the economic feasibility studies in the literature set. The tutorial review shows that economic feasibility studies for chemical CCU technologies can and should be improved in various manners. Phase I and II are often skipped or incomplete. Phase III, the calculation of assessment indicators, shows diversity in the indicator base which hampers comparability across CCU technologies of the technical and economic criteria that are key for the feasibility. Phase IV, the interpretation of results, is often missing in the literature set or lacks thorough uncertainty and sensitivity analyses. These ndings suggest that future economic feasibility studies should be made in a more standardized way to improve both the quality and comparability of economic feasibility studies. This tutorial review has raised important questions about the management of uncertainty and exibility in economic feasibility studies. The integration of Real Options Analysis (ROA) within the TEA is proposed to analyse the investment decision in CCU technologies in a dynamic setting.

Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) is one of the key technologies that may help to reduce industrial emissions. However, the deployment of CCU is hampered by various barriers, including high levels of technical, policy and market uncertainty. The real options theory (ROT) provides a method to account for these uncertainties and introduce flexibility in the investment decision by allowing decisions to be changed in response to the evolution of uncertainties. ROT is already being applied frequently in the evaluation of renewable energy or carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, e.g., addressing the uncertainty in the price of CO2. However, ROT has only found a few applications in the CCU literature to date. Therefore, this paper investigates the specific types of uncertainty that arise with the utilization of CO2, identifies the types of real options present in CCU projects and discusses the applied valuation techniques. Research gaps are identified in the CCU literature and recommendations are made to fill these gaps. The investment decision sequence for CCU projects is shown, together with the uncertainties and flexibility options in the CCU projects. This review can support the real options-based evaluations of the investment decisions in CCU projects to allow for flexibility and uncertainty.

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