Abstract Several of the world's most carbon-intensive industries have no current alternatives to CCS for deep emissions reduction because much of the CO2 is unavoidably generated by their production processes, not only from fuel use. As a consequence, many models of global decarbonisation foresee a potentially critical role for CCS. The importance of CCS in industrial applications is not matched by existing policy attention and in some key sectors technological progress is slow. CCS suffers from several market failures that confront other low-carbon technologies. In contrast to the power sector, the trade-exposure of the manufacturing and hydrocarbon sectors that would need to deploy CCS exacerbates these market failures and poses significant challenges for policy that creates the foundations for long-term climate change mitigation. Smart policy design will be able to facilitate a transition to a situation in which CCS is actually used to decrease costs, specifically those associated with greenhouse gas abatement. In a world that seriously confronts the climate challenge the first firms that install CCS will reap the benefits of reducing their marginal production costs and in the long run consumers will benefit from lower prices. In addition, producers and users of fossil fuels in sectors where marginal abatement costs could be very high, such as transport, will benefit from some relief from emissions costs as CCS in industrial applications creates headroom within a declining carbon budget. This paper attempts to address two specific questions that policy makers will need to tackle in order to design such policies: how could technology development be accelerated to ensure its availability for deployment in the 2020s?; how might incentive policies be designed to support commercial CCS investments in trade-exposed sectors?.