Stakeholder attitudes on Carbon Capture and Storage—An international comparison

Abstract

This paper presents results from a survey on stakeholder attitudes towards Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The survey is the first to make a global comparison across three major regions; USA, Japan, and Europe. The 30-question survey targeted individuals working at stakeholder organizations that seek to shape, and will need to respond to, policy on CCS, including electric utilities, oil & gas companies, CO2-intensive industries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).The results show generally small differences across the regions and between the different groups of stakeholders. All believed that the challenge of significant reductions in emissions using only current technologies was severe. There is a widespread belief both that renewable technologies such as solar power and CCS will achieve major market entry into the electricity sector within the next 10 to 20 years, whereas there is more skepticism about the role of hydrogen and especially nuclear fusion in the next 50 years. All groups were generally positive towards renewable energy. Yet, there were some notable areas of disagreement in the responses, for example, as expected, NGOs considered the threat of climate change to be more serious than the other groups. North Americans respondents were more likely to downplay the threat compared to those of the other regions. The Japanese were more concerned about the burden that would be placed on industry in the coming decade as a result of emissions constraints and NGOs were more likely to believe that the burden would be light or very light. NGOs believed CCS to be far more attractive than nuclear fusion power but much less than renewables. As expected, the risk for leakage from reservoirs was ranked number one of the risk options given.

Supporting Psychosocial Processes towards a Sustainable Energy System: the Case of CO2 Geological Storage

“…Numerous studies have been focused on stakeholders already acquainted with the technology and on the important role they play both for the deployment of the technology and for the communication of information about the technology itself (Shackley et al, 2007;Vercelli & Tambelli 2005;Heiskanen et al, 2007;Johnsson et. al., 2010;Terwel et al, 2009;Malone et al, 2009Malone et al, , 2010Fischedick et al, 2009;Ter Mors et.al., 2009).…”

Determining the success of carbon capture and storage projects

“…Stephens et al (2008) therefore highlight the need for empirical research of deployment of specific emerging technologies in and across different states to gain insights to barriers and opportunities of deployment. In the case of CCS, this empirical research of deployment is often conducted via innovation system approaches (Van Alphen et al, 2009;Van Alphen et al, 2010) as well as qualitative approaches based on stakeholder and expert views (Johnsson et al, 2010) and some modelling studies largely based on learning curve scenarios (Lohwasser and Madlener, 2012). Additionally a small number of studies use historical technological analogues to extrapolate insights for CCS deployment (Van den Bergh, 2013;Rubin, 2007).…”

Evaluation of two alternative carbon capture and storage technologies: A stochastic model

“…There are several barriers to the effective implementation of CCS technology, including financial, political, technical and public acceptability barriers (Johnsson et al, 2010). In fact, currently the number of projects is relatively small and some projects have been cancelled for reasons mentioned above.…”