Role of the cement industry in climate neutrality considering uncertainties in deployment of carbon capture technologies: A site-specific modeling approach

• Developed an energy system model for Finland with site-specific details for the cement industry. • Capturing site-specificity leads to different decision-making patterns on the sector level. • Assessed the impact of delay in carbon capture, considering natural carbon sink uncertainty. • A five-year delay in carbon capture deployment raises system costs by 2 %. • Timely carbon removal, while preserving natural sinks, is key to achieving climate neutrality. Decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries such as cement is fundamental to achieving ambitious climate neutrality targets. These industries are characterized by long-lived, capital-intensive assets and discrete reinvestment cycles, yet in energy system optimization models, common tools for assessing decarbonization pathways, they are often represented as aggregated entities with continuous investment modeling. In the cement industry, carbon capture technologies play a key role in approaching near-zero emissions, but the timing and scale of deployment are uncertain. The future contribution of natural carbon sinks to offsetting residual emissions is also unclear. This study therefore uses scenario analysis and sets out to examine how (i) the representation of industry, (ii) the timing of CCS availability, and (iii) the availability of natural carbon sinks can shape national, modeled mitigation pathways. To do so, a national energy system model, FINTIMES, is developed with detailed site-specific representation of the Finnish cement facilities. Results show that the site-specific discrete formulation produces different investment timing and technology choices in the cement industry compared with the aggregated continuous formulation. Scenario analysis further reveals that delays in the deployment of carbon capture technologies necessitate radical shifts in other sectors, notably the transport sector, consequently leading to a substantial increase in overall system costs. Insights highlight the need to preserve Finland’s natural carbon sinks and de-risk timely deployment of carbon capture and storage, while demonstrating the value of facility-level modeling in designing integrated industrial decarbonization roadmaps.