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To limit global warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, all sectors of society need to take action, including efforts to research, develop, and deploy new technologies such as carbon capture and utilization (‘CCU’). This requires systematic evaluation and comparison of promising technologies (including identifying their bottlenecks), as such understanding is essential for the efficient allocation of research funding and acceleration of technological development. One essential tool in this process is techno-economic assessment (‘TEA’); however, for CCU technologies TEA lacks an overall structure and therefore leaves many methodological choices open, resulting in little or no comparability between studies (akin to comparing apples with oranges). This dissertation first identifies the current challenges of utilizing TEA for CCU; subsequently—based on these findings, the literature, and existing best practices—a next-generation form of TEA for CCU is derived. TEA guidelines for CCU are developed, providing an overall structure as well as more specific maturity assessment, maturity-related TEA assessment frameworks, and methods to address the identified challenges. Furthermore, the developed TEA tools are applied for key industries with gigaton-scale CO2 emissions: fuels, cement and chemicals. For fuels, we show that the environmentally promising production of oxymethylene ethers (OME3-5) from CO2 and electricity remains technically and economically challenging; only one-third of input electricity is stored, and costs remain significantly higher than for diesel. For cement, we find that the concept of mineralizing kiln dust with CO2 from …