South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Tuesday it held a launch briefing for a "CCU Megaproject" to conduct large-scale demonstrations of carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) technology in cooperation with private companies including LG Chem and POSCO Holdings.

The briefing was held on Tuesday morning at the Korea Institute of Energy Research in Daejeon. About 100 officials and researchers, including the ministry and chief technology officers from LG Chem and POSCO Holdings, attended.

The CCU Megaproject is a public-private demonstration project that captures carbon dioxide emitted from high greenhouse-gas industries such as power generation and steelmaking and converts it into high value-added products such as aviation fuel and methanol. It will receive 238 billion won in state funds from 2026 to 2030.

In the power generation sector, LG Chem will lead demonstrations of technology to produce sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF) using greenhouse gases emitted from thermal power plants. In the steel sector, POSCO Holdings will develop technology to convert greenhouse gases emitted from the steel industry into syngas and cleaner marine fuels.

Ahead of the briefing, the ministry also reviewed research and development achievements in direct air capture (DAC) technology, which directly captures carbon dioxide from the air, and synthetic crude conversion technology, which produces crude oil by reacting captured carbon dioxide with hydrogen. The ministry explained that scaling up the synthetic crude conversion technology is expected to secure technology to produce 900,000 tonnes of crude oil a year in 2040.

The ministry projected that if CCU technology spreads across industry, it could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 600,000 tonnes a year in 2035. An analysis said it could lower dependence on overseas resources by 10 percent for aviation fuel and 48 percent for syngas as of 2050.

The ministry increased its CCU R&D and demonstration budget by 192 percent to 86.4 billion won this year from 29.6 billion won in 2025. In particular, to respond to resource crises such as Middle East conflicts, it expanded this year's budget to 42.4 billion won from 20 billion won by adding 22.4 billion won in supplementary budget funds for the project.