Thirty industrial firms and research institutes from five EU countries worked on the quick and cost-effective utilisation of CO₂ as part of the ALIGN-CCUS project, which was divided into six work packages (WP):

RWE Power was active in work package 1, on improving CO₂ scrubbing technology, and 4, on the utilisation of carbon dioxide.

ALIGN-CCUS involved examining all the elements in the CCUS (Carbon Capture Usage and Storage) process chain and optimising them beyond sub-system boundaries as part of a comprehensive approach. In particular, this involved questions of public acceptance, communication about CCUS, life cycle assessments (LCA) and investigating options for implementation in regions within the participating member countries (in the case of Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia as a possible location for putting CCU into practice).

ALIGN-CCUS began on 1 August 2017 and had a term of three years. The six German partners are based in NRW (except for associate partner Bosch, which opted not to receive funding for its project contribution). Besides RWE Power, the participants were Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Europe (Duisburg), Asahi-Kasei Europe (Düsseldorf), FEV Europe (Aachen), RWTH Aachen University and the Jülich Research Centre.

ALIGN-CCUS was funded as part of the ERA-NET Cofund scheme (under the Horizon 2020 R&D programme), in turn as part of the ACT initiative (Accelerating CCS Technologies) by the EU and the participating countries (for the German partners, funding was provided by the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), with processing by Jülich as project sponsor).

The total budget for ALIGN-CCUS was €23 million, with sponsorship of €14.8 million. A prominent aspect of ALIGN-CCUS was the high level of industrial participation (50 percent of the total budget).