The short version.

• CEEW's own CO2 pipeline network modelling for India puts the transport cost at $0.70–4.19 per tonne, depending on which storage sink the network is built toward: cheapest ($0.70–2.16) when routed to India's widely-distributed saline aquifers, most expensive ($2.89–4.19) when routed to basalt formations, which are concentrated mainly in Maharashtra. The proposed network reuses the right-of-way of roughly 18,000 km of existing natural gas trunk pipelines to connect 765 named emission sources to storage sites.
• That pipeline figure is small next to the real number. A peer-reviewed India-specific techno-economic study puts capture cost alone at ₹340–4,500 per tonne, and the full all-in cost — capture, compression, transport and monitoring together — at ₹8,000–13,000 per tonne or more. That's several times higher than the commonly-cited global "avoided cost" figure of roughly $40–60 a tonne, and it means transport (CEEW's $0.70–4.19, well under ₹400 at any plausible exchange rate) is a small fraction of what a company actually pays to sequester one tonne of CO2 in India specifically.
• India's own storage-potential estimates vary enormously depending on scope, and citing one figure as "the" number is a mistake this piece is careful not to make: CEEW's broadest estimate is 317 gigatonnes (saline aquifers, basalt formations, and oil/gas/coal fields combined); a separate peer-reviewed paper cites 359 Gt; DGH's own draft 2030 CCUS roadmap, scoped only to oil-producing basins suitable for enhanced oil recovery and saline storage with known subsurface data, puts viable capacity at roughly 1.2 Gt — a fraction of either broader figure.
• On who pays: the Union Budget 2026-27 allocated ₹20,000 crore (commonly cited abroad as roughly $2.1–2.4 billion, depending on the outlet's conversion) to CCUS, and the Expenditure Finance Committee has specifically cleared a ₹19,700 crore, five-year, government-funded scheme covering steel, cement, power, refineries and chemicals — this is direct government capital, not a loan guarantee or tax credit alone. NITI Aayog's policy framework recommends a "hub-and-cluster" model that pools multiple emitters onto shared pipeline and storage infrastructure specifically to spread fixed costs across more tonnes, rather than each company building and paying for its own dedicated line.
• Scale the numbers against each other and a gap appears: NITI Aayog's own framework estimates $100–150 billion in investment is needed through 2050 to hit its 750 million tonnes/year ambition. The current ₹19,700 crore government scheme is roughly 1-2% of that low-end figure — a meaningful first commitment, on the evidence here, not remotely the full bill.

What "bridging source and sink" actually means

A CCUS project has three physical stages: capturing CO2 at the point it's emitted (a steel furnace, a cement kiln, a power plant, a refinery, a fertiliser unit), transporting it to wherever it will be permanently stored, and injecting it underground at that storage site. The "source" is the emitting facility; the "sink" is the geological formation — a saline aquifer, a basalt formation, or a depleted oil or gas field — that can hold the CO2 indefinitely. Almost never are these two places close together, which is what makes the connecting pipeline network a genuine infrastructure problem rather than an afterthought.

CEEW's own network-design work for India tackled this directly: rather than proposing new, dedicated CO2 pipelines built from scratch, it modelled an optimised network that reuses the right-of-way of roughly 18,000 km of India's existing natural gas trunk pipelines, connecting 765 identified emission sources across the power, iron and steel, cement, fertiliser, refinery and aluminium sectors to potential underground storage sites. Separately, MoPNG's own Draft 2030 Roadmap for CCUS — prepared by a dedicated "Upstream for CCS/CCUS" (UFCC) task force — cites a broader figure of roughly 25,000 km of existing oil and gas pipelines already in operation in India as the base infrastructure a CO2 network could piggyback on; this is a different, larger universe (all oil and gas pipelines, not specifically gas trunk lines) than CEEW's 18,000 km figure, and the two shouldn't be treated as the same number describing the same thing. Both plans converge on the same underlying idea, sometimes called a hub-and-cluster model: match multiple sources to a smaller number of shared sinks, and route CO2 along corridors that already have pipeline right-of-way secured, rather than acquiring fresh land for every single connection.

The three-stage capture/transport/storage framing is standard across the sourcing for this piece. CEEW's 18,000 km existing-gas-trunk-pipeline network design, its 765-source count, and the sector list are from CEEW's published CO2 pipeline network study (ceew.in), reached via search-indexed summary; this piece could not fetch ceew.in directly, as the domain was blocked in this research environment. MoPNG's Draft 2030 Roadmap for CCUS, its UFCC task-force origin, and its ~25,000 km existing-pipeline figure are drawn from search-indexed summaries of the roadmap PDF as hosted on both mopng.gov.in and dghindia.gov.in, both blocked from direct fetch; this piece treats the 18,000 km and 25,000 km figures as measuring different things (gas trunk lines specifically versus all oil and gas pipelines) rather than as competing estimates of the same quantity, though it could not independently confirm that scope distinction beyond the plain reading of each source's own framing.

The pipeline cost itself: $0.70 to $4.19 a tonne, and sink choice is what moves it

CEEW's modelling gives a specific, India-scoped answer to what the pipeline segment alone costs: $0.70 to $4.19 per tonne of CO2 transported, with the exact figure depending heavily on which storage sink the network is built toward. Routing to saline aquifer storage specifically comes in cheapest, at $0.70–2.16 per tonne, because saline aquifers are geographically widespread across India, keeping average pipeline distances shorter. Routing to basalt formations is markedly more expensive, at $2.89–4.19 per tonne, because basalt storage in India is concentrated mainly in Maharashtra — meaning sources located elsewhere in the country face materially longer pipeline runs to reach it, even though basalt has a genuine technical advantage worth noting: injected CO2 mineralises into solid carbonate rock inside basalt formations, a more permanent storage mechanism than simply displacing brine in a saline aquifer.

The pipeline build cost itself, per CEEW's own cost breakdown, splits roughly as follows: materials account for about 40% of total pipeline cost, laying (construction) another 30%, right-of-way acquisition 15%, and miscellaneous costs the remaining 15%. That right-of-way share is exactly why reusing existing gas-pipeline corridors matters financially, not just logistically: a large share of a from-scratch pipeline's cost is land acquisition and clearance, and piggybacking on already-secured gas-pipeline right-of-way sidesteps a meaningful chunk of that specific cost line.

The $0.70–4.19/tonne transport cost range, its breakdown by saline-aquifer-only ($0.70–2.16) versus basalt-only ($2.89–4.19) sink configurations, and the material (40%)/laying (30%)/right-of-way (15%)/miscellaneous (15%) pipeline cost-component breakdown are all from CEEW's CO2 pipeline network study, reached via search-indexed summary; direct access to ceew.in was blocked in this research environment, so these figures rest on how the study's findings were summarised in search results rather than a full read of CEEW's own methodology and assumptions, and should be verified against CEEW's own publication before being treated as precise inputs to a real financial model.

Storage potential: three numbers, three different scopes

Ask "how much CO2 can India actually store" and the answer depends entirely on what's being counted, and this piece found three meaningfully different figures worth naming side by side rather than picking one and presenting it as settled. CEEW's broadest estimate puts India's total underground storage potential at 317 gigatonnes of CO2, split across 144 Gt in saline aquifers, 170 Gt in basalt formations, and the remainder in oil, gas and coal fields; India is unusual in having large onshore flood basalt formations available for this specifically, which is part of why basalt features so heavily in the India-specific literature even though it's a less commonly discussed storage medium globally. A separate peer-reviewed techno-economic paper on CCUS in India cites a similar but not identical figure of 359 Gt. DGH's own Draft 2030 CCUS Roadmap, working from a narrower and more operationally cautious scope — specifically oil-producing basins where enhanced oil recovery and saline storage are viable using subsurface data DGH already holds, concentrated in basins like Cambay — puts viable capacity at roughly 1.2 Gt. That is a small fraction of either broader estimate, and the gap is the point: the 317-359 Gt figures describe theoretical geological potential across every storage medium considered, while DGH's 1.2 Gt figure describes what the agency actually regulating India's subsurface currently regards as viable, given existing data and existing basins already in industry use. A reader encountering any single one of these numbers in isolation should ask which scope it's using before treating it as India's storage ceiling.

CEEW's 317 Gt figure and its saline/basalt/other split are from CEEW's own published storage-potential assessment (ceew.in), reached via search-indexed summary, direct fetch blocked. The 359 Gt figure is from the peer-reviewed paper "CCUS in India: A Techno-Economic and Policy Roadmap to Net-Zero Amid Climate and Environmental Challenges" (Journal of the Geological Society of India, 2025, authors Sadiq, Sharma, Kalita and Pandey), reached via search-indexed abstract/summary; this piece could not fetch the full paper directly, as pubs.geoscienceworld.org was blocked in this research environment. DGH's 1.2 Gt "viable" figure and its Cambay-basin/EOR framing are from search-indexed summaries of DGH's own Draft 2030 CCUS Roadmap, also blocked from direct fetch. This piece's characterisation of why the three figures differ (theoretical geological potential across all media versus DGH's narrower, data-backed viable estimate) is its own reading of the scope language used in each source's summary, not a claim any one source makes explicitly about the other two.

The real cost driver isn't the pipeline. It's capture

Set CEEW's transport-only figure next to the same peer-reviewed India-specific paper's full-chain estimate, and the pipeline's share of the total cost looks small. That paper puts capture cost alone — before transport, compression or monitoring are added — at ₹340 to ₹4,500 per tonne, and the full all-in cost of capturing, compressing, transporting and monitoring a tonne of CO2 in India at roughly ₹8,000 to ₹13,000 or more. Even at the high end of CEEW's pipeline-only estimate ($4.19/tonne), that converts to well under ₹400 at any plausible current exchange rate — a small fraction of an ₹8,000-13,000 all-in figure. The pipeline segment, in other words, is not where the money goes.

This India-specific all-in figure is also strikingly higher than the headline number most commonly cited internationally for CCS: a widely-used global estimate puts the overall cost of capture and storage at roughly $40–60 per tonne of CO2 avoided (with capture alone estimated internationally at $15–120/tonne, pipeline transport at $0–5/tonne, onshore storage at €1–20/tonne, and compression/preparation at €10–25/tonne). Converted loosely, $40–60/tonne sits somewhere in the ₹3,300–5,000 range — well below the ₹8,000–13,000 all-in figure the India-specific paper reports. This piece cannot fully explain that gap from the sourcing available — it may reflect India-specific factors like plant vintage, capture-technology maturity, smaller average facility scale, or simply different methodological choices between the two studies — but the gap itself is worth stating plainly rather than picking whichever number sounds more favourable to CCUS's prospects in India. Anyone citing a "global" CCS cost figure as if it applies directly to an Indian project should treat that as a premise needing its own check, not a safe assumption.

The ₹340-4,500/tonne capture-cost range and the ₹8,000-13,000+/tonne all-in figure are both from the same peer-reviewed paper cited in Section 3 (Journal of the Geological Society of India, 2025), reached via search-indexed summary, direct fetch blocked. The international $40-60/tonne avoided-cost figure, and its capture/transport/storage/compression component breakdown, are drawn from a mix of secondary sourcing on global CCS costs (including material corresponding to Carbon Management Europe's "The costs of CO2 capture, transport and storage" publication, which this piece could not fetch directly, as carbonmanagementeurope.org was blocked) and general IPCC/IEA-adjacent cost literature reached via search rather than a primary IEA or IPCC document read directly (iea.org was also blocked from direct fetch in this research environment). The loose ₹3,300-5,000 conversion of the $40-60 figure is this piece's own rough arithmetic at a general current exchange-rate assumption, not a cited figure from any source, and should not be treated as precise. This piece explicitly could not determine why the India-specific all-in figure runs several times higher than the commonly-cited global figure, and reports that as an open question rather than resolving it with an unsupported explanation.

Who actually pays: a government scheme, a hub-and-cluster model, and a regulatory gap

On the direct question of who bears the cost, the clearest current answer is: substantially, the government, at least for this first phase. The Union Budget 2026-27 allocated ₹20,000 crore to CCUS (cited abroad as roughly $2.1–2.4 billion, depending on which outlet's exchange-rate conversion is used — treat the rupee figure as the anchor number and the dollar figures as rough conversions of it, not as independently-arrived-at estimates). More specifically, India's Expenditure Finance Committee has cleared a ₹19,700 crore, five-year, government-funded scheme aimed at developing CCUS technologies and geological storage reservoirs across five carbon-intensive sectors: steel, cement, power, refineries and chemicals. The Ministry of Power is the CCUS mission's nodal agency, coordinating across the other relevant line ministries. This is direct capital outlay, not merely a loan guarantee or a tax incentive layered on top of private investment — though viability gap funding, intended specifically to de-risk early commercial projects and draw in private co-investment on commercially workable terms, is one of the mechanisms the scheme is expected to use rather than the government building and owning the infrastructure outright end to end.

On the specific mechanism for spreading pipeline and storage costs across multiple companies, NITI Aayog's own CCUS Policy Framework (released November 2022) is explicit: a hub-and-cluster model, distributing the fixed costs of shared pipeline and storage infrastructure across the aggregated CO2 volumes of multiple emitting sources, is what the framework expects to bring per-tonne infrastructure costs down to a level where CCUS becomes commercially viable without permanent subsidy dependence. That's a direct answer to "who bridges the source-sink gap, and who pays for it": rather than each company financing and owning its own dedicated pipeline to its own chosen storage site, multiple emitters in a region are meant to share one piece of shared infrastructure, splitting the fixed cost across a larger combined tonnage.

One genuine regulatory gap is worth naming plainly. India's Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) already runs a "common carrier" framework for natural gas pipelines — any entity building, operating or expanding a pipeline as a common or contract carrier needs PNGRB authorisation, and common-carrier pipelines must be operated on a non-discriminatory, open-access basis so multiple shippers can use the same line. Nothing found for this piece shows that same common-carriage framework, or a CO2-specific pipeline safety and health regime, has actually been extended or adapted to cover CO2 pipelines specifically — search-indexed material describing India's CCUS infrastructure gaps explicitly names "how pipeline networks and common carriage systems will be holistically developed" as still-unresolved, alongside the need for dedicated CO2 pipeline health and safety regulation. In practice, that means the legal and regulatory machinery for shared, multi-shipper CO2 pipelines — the exact structure the hub-and-cluster model depends on — is not yet confirmed to exist in the form it would need to, even though the analogous framework for natural gas has been operating for years. One concrete, named project that sidesteps some of this uncertainty by linking directly to a revenue stream: ONGC and IOCL have signed an MoU to establish a CO2-based enhanced-oil-recovery system at the Gandhar field in Gujarat, where captured CO2 is injected specifically to boost oil output, giving that particular transport-and-storage chain a direct commercial return rather than relying purely on subsidy or a future carbon price.

The ₹20,000 crore Union Budget 2026-27 allocation and the ₹19,700 crore Expenditure Finance Committee-cleared scheme, its five-year window and five-sector scope, are corroborated across Downtoearth's coverage of the Budget's CCUS allocation and Whalesbook's reporting on the cleared scheme; the various dollar-equivalent figures cited by international trade outlets ($2.1bn, $2.2bn, $2.4bn) are treated here as rough conversions of the same underlying rupee figure at different exchange-rate snapshots, not as independently verified figures of their own. The Ministry of Power's role as CCUS mission nodal agency and the viability-gap-funding mechanism are from PIB press releases (pib.gov.in), reached via search index. NITI Aayog's November 2022 CCUS Policy Framework and its hub-and-cluster cost-sharing logic are corroborated across NITI Aayog's own hosted report (niti.gov.in) and secondary coverage (drishtiias), both reached via search index; this piece did not read the full NITI Aayog PDF directly. PNGRB's common-carrier framework for natural gas pipelines is drawn from Mondaq's and Lexology's legal-commentary coverage of Indian gas-pipeline regulation; the specific finding that CO2-pipeline common-carriage and safety regulation remains undeveloped is from search-indexed secondary literature on India's CCUS infrastructure gaps, and this piece did not find a primary PNGRB or MoPNG statement confirming or denying that a CO2-specific extension is currently in progress. The ONGC-IOCL Gandhar field CO2-EOR MoU is from search-indexed trade coverage; this piece did not independently verify the MoU's current status or timeline against either company's own disclosures.

The capital math, and the gap between the current scheme and the 2050 ambition

A separate, capital-cost-specific figure helps size what the government's current commitment actually buys. Current estimates place the capital cost of building capacity to capture 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at roughly ₹900–1,000 crore, with scaling to 10 million tonnes of annual capacity requiring on the order of ₹15,000 crore in capital deployment — a figure the reporting describing it treats as broadly consistent with the government's planned ₹19,700 crore allocation once regulatory infrastructure, R&D spending and viability gap funding are factored in alongside the pure capture capex. Read plainly, that suggests the current scheme is sized to help stand up a first tranche of national capture capacity in the single-digit-to-low-double-digit million-tonnes-per-year range, not to fund the technology at the scale India's own stated ambition eventually requires.

That ambition, per NITI Aayog's framework, is 750 million tonnes per year of CCUS capacity by 2050, requiring an estimated $100–150 billion in cumulative investment through that year. Set the current ₹19,700 crore scheme against even the low end of that range and it accounts for roughly one to two percent of the total investment NITI Aayog itself says is needed. That is not a criticism of the scheme's size in isolation — a first-phase government commitment covering five priority sectors and explicitly designed to de-risk early projects for follow-on private capital is a reasonable way to start a capital-intensive technology's build-out, and the scheme's own design (viability gap funding rather than fully socialised capex) reflects an expectation that private money is meant to carry most of the eventual load. But it is a reason to treat "the government has committed ₹20,000 crore to CCUS" and "India has funded its CCUS build-out" as two very different claims, and this piece is careful not to conflate them.

The ₹900-1,000 crore per MT/year and ₹15,000 crore per 10 MT/year capital-cost figures are from search-indexed coverage discussing the Union Budget 2026-27 CCUS allocation's adequacy; this piece did not trace these figures back to a named primary source beyond that secondary reporting, and they should be treated as illustrative rather than as a precise, source-verified capex benchmark. NITI Aayog's $100-150 billion-through-2050 investment estimate and its 750 million tonnes/year 2050 capacity target are from the same NITI Aayog CCUS Policy Framework sourcing as Section 5, reached via search index. The one-to-two-percent comparison between the current scheme and the total investment need is this piece's own arithmetic, using the low end of NITI Aayog's stated range and the rupee-to-dollar conversion implicit in the ₹19,700 crore/roughly-$2.2bn figures already discussed in Section 5; it is offered as an order-of-magnitude illustration, not a precise ratio.

What doesn't follow from any of this

None of this should be read as CO2 pipeline infrastructure being a non-issue for India's CCUS build-out — the regulatory gap around common-carriage and pipeline-safety rules specifically for CO2, described in Section 5, is real and needs resolving before a genuine multi-shipper hub-and-cluster network can operate the way NITI Aayog's framework envisions. What doesn't follow is treating the pipeline segment as the primary cost problem to solve: on the evidence gathered here, it is a small fraction of the all-in per-tonne cost, with capture doing most of the heavy lifting on price. It also doesn't follow that India has one settled number for its underground storage potential, or that the commonly-cited global $40-60/tonne CCS cost figure applies cleanly to an Indian project; both need their scope checked before being repeated. And it doesn't follow that the government's current ₹19,700 crore scheme represents anything close to full funding for CCUS at the scale India's own 2050 ambition describes — on NITI Aayog's own numbers, it's a first instalment, not the total bill. Readers evaluating a real CCUS investment, financing, or policy decision should verify every figure in this piece directly against CEEW's, NITI Aayog's, DGH's, and the peer-reviewed literature's own primary publications, several of which this piece could not access directly due to network restrictions in its research environment, rather than relying on this summary alone.

Sources and caveats