About Carbon Science and Engineering

Carbon Science and Engineering

Carbon Science and Engineering is an English-language, open-access academic journal published in Beijing by KeAi Communications, with publishing services provided by Elsevier. It works in two connected fields: carbon science, and the engineering of carbon capture, utilisation and storage — CCUS. Its stated mission, in its own formulation, is to explore science and advance engineering: to publish significant scientific discoveries alongside engineering advances, so that new academic insights, technological breakthroughs and engineering case studies in carbon science and CCUS are shared on a single international platform.

The journal is owned by the International CCUS Technology Innovation & Cooperation Organization, which retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues. It is published quarterly, peer review is conducted under the responsibility of its editorial board, and its editorial office is at No. 31 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing. It publishes research articles, reviews, perspectives and engineering achievements, a mixture that reflects its deliberate position between the laboratory and the full-scale plant.

The publisher: KeAi Communications in Beijing

KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. is a Beijing-based joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (CSPM) and Elsevier, two of the world's leading publishers of scientific, technical and medical literature. Repurposed in 2013 as an open-access journal publishing service provider, KeAi has built a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across all scientific disciplines. It leverages the publishing and technology capabilities of its parent companies, including ScienceDirect, Editorial Manager, data analytics and production systems.

For a journal concerned with deployed technology as well as discovery, that infrastructure provides the standard apparatus of modern scholarly publishing: online submission, automatic screening of manuscripts with iThenticate's CrossCheck to detect overlapping and similar text, and immediate, permanent open access to the published article. KeAi describes its mission as publishing first-class research outputs from the research community to benefit society globally, with a particular role in bringing research originating in China to international readers — relevant here, because China is both a major source of carbon emissions and a major site of CCUS research and demonstration.

Capture: the front end of the CCUS chain

The scope is organised as the CCUS chain itself, beginning with capture. Carbon Science and Engineering covers pre-combustion capture, post-combustion capture and oxy-fuel combustion, the three classical routes for separating carbon dioxide from industrial and energy processes, together with direct air capture (DAC), which removes CO₂ from ambient air, and direct ocean capture (DOC), which extracts it from seawater. That breadth matters because each route poses different scientific problems — solvents, sorbents, membranes, energy penalties and integration with the host process — and the journal treats them as one field rather than as separate specialisms.

Capture research in the journal sits alongside the carbon-related equipment and materials that make it possible, which the scope names explicitly as part of its remit. Work on capture process design and scale-up appears under CCUS engineering, recognising that a separation method that works at bench scale must still be engineered into a process that can run continuously, economically and safely at industrial scale.

Transport, utilisation and conversion

Captured carbon dioxide has to move, and the journal covers carbon transport by pipeline, ship, rail and truck, together with the transport infrastructure and network engineering those modes require. Pipelines raise questions of phase behaviour, fracture control and network design; shipping raises questions of liquefaction, terminals and boil-off; and a mature CCUS system needs a network that connects many sources to shared storage, which is an engineering and planning problem in its own right.

Utilisation is covered in several forms. The journal includes carbon materials; carbon mineralisation and permanent sequestration; carbon resource utilisation and transformation through chemical, biological and mineral carbonation routes; electrochemical and photochemical conversion; and the conversion of CO₂ into chemicals and building materials. In this framing, carbon dioxide is treated both as a waste stream to be disposed of and as a feedstock — a C1 building block that can be converted into fuels, chemicals and long-lived products, or locked into mineral form permanently.

Storage and CCUS engineering

On storage, the scope covers enhanced oil recovery with CO₂ (CO₂-EOR), enhanced gas recovery (CO₂-EGR) and enhanced coalbed methane recovery (CO₂-ECBM), in which injected carbon dioxide both stores carbon and increases hydrocarbon recovery, as well as geological storage in saline aquifers, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams and basalt formations. Subsurface injection and long-term storage monitoring are named as engineering topics, reflecting the need to demonstrate that stored CO₂ stays where it is put.

The CCUS engineering section is the broadest in the scope. It covers CCUS, CCS and CCU engineering as such; DACCS, meaning direct air capture with carbon storage, and BECCS, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, the two routes most often discussed as carbon dioxide removal; industrial carbon management for the cement, steel, chemical and power sectors; digital twin and AI-enabled carbon management systems; and techno-economic analysis and life-cycle assessment, the methods by which a project's cost and its true net climate benefit are tested. Together these topics position the journal as a venue for whole-system studies, not only for component research.

Carbon policy, markets and management

Uniquely among purely technical carbon titles, Carbon Science and Engineering includes a full policy and management strand. It covers carbon pricing theory and market practice, climate investment and finance, low-carbon policy and governance, greenhouse gas protocols, standards and methodologies, policy assessment covering subsidies, regulations and incentives, carbon footprint and emission monitoring, carbon market mechanisms and carbon trading, and the public acceptance and social dimensions of CCUS.

That inclusion is a considered editorial choice. CCUS projects are capital-intensive, long-lived and dependent on a price or mandate for carbon; a technically sound project can fail for want of a workable market mechanism or public consent. By publishing policy, finance and social research beside capture chemistry and storage geology, the journal gives engineers, project developers and policy researchers a shared evidence base for decisions that are simultaneously technical and institutional.

Article types and peer review

The journal publishes full-length articles and reviews, within a wider stated output of research articles, reviews, perspectives and engineering achievements — the last category signalling that documented engineering results and case studies, not only hypothesis-driven research papers, are welcome contributions. Its peer review model differs from many KeAi titles: Carbon Science and Engineering follows a double anonymized review process, in which reviewers and authors are anonymous to each other.

As with other KeAi journals, a submission is first assessed by the editors for suitability, and if suitable is typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers for independent expert assessment of its scientific quality, with the final decision taken by the editors. The editorial office may desk-reject papers that are out of scope, raise ethical conflicts, show high similarity to existing text, lack originality, or contain flaws in research design or methods. Editors do not take part in decisions on papers they have written, papers by family members or colleagues, or papers relating to products or services in which they have an interest, and submissions from board members or from authors with a conflict of interest with a guest editor are handled confidentially by a different member of the team. Authors must follow Elsevier's publishing ethics policies and disclose competing interests and funding sources.

Open access, licensing and charges

The journal is fully open access: every article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format, immediately after publication, and may be read, downloaded, copied and distributed by anyone. Articles are published under a Creative Commons licence chosen by the author, either CC BY, which permits copying, adaptation and commercial use with appropriate credit, a link to the licence and an indication of any changes, or CC BY-NC-ND, which permits copying and distribution for non-commercial purposes only and does not permit distribution of a changed or edited version. Authors retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights for their individual articles, while KeAi Communications is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights.

The cost of that model is normally met by an article processing charge paid by authors, their institutions or their funders. For Carbon Science and Engineering, all APCs for articles submitted before 31 December 2029 will be fully waived, so early contributors publish at no charge during the journal's establishment period. The journal appears quarterly, and its editors can be contacted at its Beijing editorial office on Xueyuan Road in Haidian District.

Who the journal is for

The readership spans the whole CCUS value chain: chemists and materials scientists working on sorbents, solvents, membranes and carbon materials; process and pipeline engineers; geologists and reservoir engineers working on storage; project developers and industrial carbon managers in cement, steel, chemicals and power; and analysts, economists and policy specialists working on carbon pricing, markets and governance. Few venues deliberately assemble all of those groups, and that assembly is the journal's defining feature.

Prospective authors should read the current guide for authors on the journal's KeAi pages before submitting, check the editorial board listing there, and note the 2029 waiver deadline. For readers, the journal offers a single, freely accessible source in which a capture material, a transport network study, a storage monitoring paper and a carbon-market analysis can be found side by side — a reflection of how CCUS actually has to be built.