The Social Dynamics of Carbon Capture and Storage

Understanding CCS Representations, Governance and Innovation

Nils Markusson, Simon Shackley, Benjamin Evar, Nils Markusson, Simon Shackley, Benjamin Evar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136311246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Business

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged rapidly as a crucial technological option for decarbonising electricity supply and mitigating climate change. Great hopes are being pinned on this new technology but it is also facing growing scepticism and criticism. This book is the first to bring together the full range of social and policy issues surrounding CCS shedding new light on this potentially vital technology and its future. The book covers many crucial topics including the roles and positions that different publics, NGOs, industry, political parties and media are taking up; the way CCS is organised, supported and regulated; how CCS is being debated and judged; how innovation, demonstration and learning are occurring and being conceptualised and promoted; and the role of CCS in the transition to a low carbon energy future. The authors draw on a variety of approaches, concepts, methods and themes and provide a new understanding of innovation in the energy and climate change fields. It tackles the many issues in a way that speaks to those concerned not only to understand these developments, but to those who are involved in the scientific and technological work itself, as well as those charged with evaluating and making decisions relevant to the future of the technology.

1

INTRODUCTION

Nils Markusson, Simon Shackley and Benjamin Evar

Don’t forget to breathe out! Right now, the future of carbon capture and storage (CCS) seems very much to be hanging in the balance. The suspense is high and tensions are surfacing. Lots of questions are being asked: if CCS promises so much as a response to climate change, then why are there such different views of it? If the technology is backed by resource-strong actors, why then does progress seem to be stalling? Should all effort be targeted on one option/project to get the technology up and going as soon as possible, and this way demonstrate a response to the urgent problem of climate mitigation, or should we adopt a more cautious approach? Can the technology be both robust and flexible enough to withstand the litmus test of trials, demonstration and deployment? Clearly, the future of CCS will be determined by things both apparently technical and social. This book is about the socio-technical and political dynamics of CCS. It will shed light on the related perceptions and representations, governance and decision-making and innovation processes.

If you are not familiar with carbon capture and storage, you will find a short description of what it is in Chapter 2. There, you will also find a concise description of the key policy, regulatory and economic issues surrounding CCS and you may wish to read that chapter to familiarise yourself with the background information necessary to make sense of the debates covered in this book.

So why should you read a book about the social science of CCS?

CCS has risen meteorically among climate change mitigation options and over the last decade it has come to be widely accepted as a key technology option¹ to decarbonise the energy system. It features in the climate policy documents of many countries as a cornerstone of their mitigation strategies and is widely explained and promoted as part of a palette of technologies with which to paint decarbonisation scenarios. Academia has been central in developing CCS knowledge and visions and in legitimising the technology and giving it credibility. The 2005 Special Report on CCS from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2005) represents a key event in this process. Whatever one’s beliefs and opinions about CCS, it is clear that it has played, and will continue for some time to play, a very important role in our deliberations on climate change and how to mitigate it. So if you are interested in the climate change problem, and especially in what we do about it, then this is a book for you.

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for the future development of the energy system, alongside concerns of supply security, affordability, competitiveness and choice of governance structures. Among technical decarbonisation options, CCS offers the unique prospect of reconciling substantial climate change mitigation with the continued use of fossil fuels. This would preserve the economic value of the existing fossil fuel regime, with its capital assets, skills and institutions – a fact that helps in explaining the wide appeal of CCS and its rapid rise on climate and energy policy agendas. As a consequence, the technology has gained salience in corporate as well as public sector energy strategies. If you are interested in the future of the energy system, this book will speak to that topic as well.

CCS is of potentially huge importance and of immediate relevance to a wide range of people across the climate change and energy domains. This book sets out to shed light on the social nature of its development, and to help guide the thinking and actions of everyone with an interest in the technology, be it private interest or professional, from a supportive or sceptical position and with or without training in the social sciences or indeed in the science and technology of CCS.

The realities of technology development have yet to catch up with the grand visions formulated within the CCS arena of supporters. Whilst mature component technologies and small-scale pilots exist, the world has yet to see a full-scale, integrated system in operation on power plants.² During the last few years, the CCS community has been up against political hesitation to meet the cost of large-scale demonstrations. There also remain technical, scientific, economic, financial, regulatory and public acceptance uncertainties, but the technology is on the verge of being tested at demonstration scale. This makes for interesting times as high expectations meet practical experience and we should expect surprising developments to unfold over the coming years. This makes the timing excellent for a book that looks into the activities and processes of technology development and deployment, scientific uncertainty, policymaking, public understanding and other issues that social science is apt at exploring and explaining.

One aspect that hopefully makes this book attractive is that it shows how social science can contribute to our understanding of CCS beyond the analytical perspectives available from engineering and natural science, which have tended to dominate discussions around the technology to date. There is a growing body of social science, broadly defined, research on CCS. One focus of this literature is based on economic modelling, exploring scenarios of deployment and assessments of the impact and cost efficiency of CCS and other climate mitigation options. Another major focus has been work on understanding the perceptions of, and opinions on, CCS of publics and other actors. Beyond this, there are important strands of research on policy, economics and finance and on innovation processes. Social science research on CCS thus spans a wide range of disciplines, methodological approaches and epistemological assumptions.

There have been efforts to integrate this growing body of research with perspectives in natural science and engineering – not least the book Carbon Capture and its Storage: An Integrated Assessment, edited by Shackley and Gough (2006). This work presented an introduction to CCS from geological, engineering and social science perspectives and provided case-studies of CCS deployment in the UK. A similar work released in 2007 and edited by Wilson and Gerard – Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Integrating Technology, Monitoring and Regulation – was written primarily from an American perspective and dealt more directly with the issue of permitting and liability. There have also been substantial outputs from integrative social science projects. The book Caching the Carbon: The Politics and Policy of Carbon Capture and Storage, edited by Meadowcroft and Langhelle (2009a) provided accounts of CCS development and debate in a range of countries and valuable insights based on a comparative analysis of policies and politics. Most recently, a special issue of the journal Global Environmental Change, edited by Bäckstrand et al. (2011) brought together contributions from social science researchers, also with a strong focus on policy and politics.

This book builds on this emerging literature and is the first book to present a wider range of social science perspectives on CCS, beyond analyses of policy, politics and regulation. It will demonstrate the contributions that social science can make to a wide range of topics, from actors’ varying perceptions of the technology, to complex governance challenges, to the peculiar nature of CCS innovation processes.

From the point of view of social science practitioners, CCS offers intriguing possibilities for new analysis and learning. Climate change is one of the more complex problems facing humanity, a type of problem that has been called ‘wicked’ and ‘messy’ (Verweij and Thompson 2006). One important reason that it is so difficult to address and resolve is that our societies, with their underpinning capitalist economic engine, are arguably built and organised around the use of fossil fuels. Evolutionary economists have therefore begun to reinterpret the history of industrialisation as a process in which human societies have captured the energy stored in fossil fuel carriers (coal, oil and gas reserves) in ever more efficient means, such that structural and transformative economic, technological and socio-behavioural change not only has been manifested, but become locked-in (see Box 1.1) (Arthur 1989). In other words, our dependence on fossil fuels has not only enabled, but also defined and limited our current socio-industrial systems and their future development.

BOX 1.1 CARBON LOCK-IN

Researchers studying how technologies evolve have developed the concept of ‘technological lock-in’, meaning the way in which technologies, social practices, regulatory regimes, standards, skills and management systems co-evolve and hence become highly interconnected over time (Arthur 1989, 1994). If a technology wins out amongst a range of options as the main choice in a particular technological sub-domain, it is not necessarily selected because it is automatically ‘superior’: timing, strategy and historic circumstance, as much as optimality, can determine the winner (Utterback 1994). But once widespread selection has taken place, apparently inferior designs can become locked-in through a path-dependent process (Unruh 2000: 820). Lock-in means that any substantial change to a socio-technical regime will require the overcoming of the inertia inherent in the status quo. A whole set of consecutive changes will be needed in other parts of the associated system (such as skill-sets, regulations and standards, companies with appropriate capabilities, a high standard of performance by the challenging technology, together with a body of consumers that understands and knows – or is prepared to invest time and effort in learning – how to use it).

Unruh (2000, 2002) has coined the term ‘carbon lock-in’, which we define here as: ‘the interaction between fossil fuel technologies, infrastructure, institutions and social practices such that strong socio-technical, economic practices and behavioural incentives favour continued use of carbon intensive technologies’. Examples of carbon lock-in include: expansion of electricity networks powered by centralised fossil fuel fired generating plants; and the petrol-fuelled personal car transport system.

Studies of CCS and lock-in suggest that CCS (assuming it develops according to current assumptions) would reinforce carbon lock-in (Unruh and Carillo-Hermosilla 2006; Markusson and Haszeldine 2010; Vergragt et al. 2011; Shackley and Thompson 2012). Indeed, a common argument for CCS is that it promises to conserve the investments made and social practices constructed around the burning of fossil fuels. However, CCS is as yet immature, and its future form cannot be known for certain. There exist competing visions, for example its application to biomass-based industrial processes, air capture etc.

The question, then, is whether we can assess the likelihood that CCS as a socio-technical entity in itself is being locked into a particular development path. Here opinions diverge. Vergragt et al. (2011) argue that biomass CCS, whilst most likely dependent upon fossil fuel CCS for developing storage infrastructure, is being marginalised and crowded out in R&D and policy visions by a strong focus on application on fossil fuels. Shackley and Thompson (2012), in contrast, distinguish between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ lock-in and emphasise the continuing flexibility of CCS and the uncertainty about its future.

A transition to a post-carbon society would affect most, perhaps all, aspects of society. Decarbonisation is clearly a threat to many established practices and institutions. It is arguably larger to those same institutions and interlocked systems than the impacts of climate change themselves, since global warming will impact on the global south more than the industrialised north, which is the source of the lion’s share of the emissions. The key promise of CCS, to square our need of continued reliance on fossil fuels with climate change mitigation, therefore appeals not only to those industries that are directly dependent on fossil fuels, but a range of actors throughout society. This line of thought has been supported in economic assessments by institutions such as the International Energy Agency, which have estimated that the cost of climate change mitigation without CCS would rise by as much as 70 per cent (IEA 2009). CCS has thus offered an opportunity to reconcile previously opposing interests, and has, for example, played a role in bringing fossil fuel actors to the climate change negotiation table. This inevitably also leads to CCS embodying tensions between different interests. Meadowcroft and Langhelle (2009c) as well as Pollak et al. (2011) have identified an apparent paradox: that the actors expressing the most enthusiasm for CCS – government and industries with strong fossil fuel interests from either the use of production and export of fossil fuels – are not necessarily the same actors that have the highest carbon mitigation ambitions.

One consequence of CCS sitting on the fault line between the fossil regime and the climate change imperative is that CCS presents a great opportunity to study controversy, conflict and the politicisation of technology, especially as CCS migrates from the imaginaries of R&D to fully realised investments. The technology can work as a ‘lab’ for the social scientific study of technology politics. For the reader with an interest in the role of technology in society, this is another reason to keep reading this book. And, before social scientists are accused of indulgence and working with only an academic audience in mind, studying controversy and conflict is often incredibly useful to hard-nosed policymakers, industrialists and investment fund managers in the very practical sense of effecting change that is ‘acceptable’ (including the possibility of no change) and avoiding proposals that are likely to be unacceptable, and such costly mistakes. Conversely, social science insights may also be used by those opposing development, to guide their efforts. Furthermore, social science can provide invaluable insights into how research, development and demonstration programmes might be shaped and organised such that those issues ‘uncovered’ through controversy can be addressed and, perhaps, even resolved through alternative forms for decision-making.

We can explore this issue further. It is often stated that there is only one reason to develop and deploy CCS: climate change mitigation. This highlights the fact that CCS is an environmental technology whose envisioned function is to abate CO₂ emissions, rather than a technology that in itself produces low-carbon electric power like renewables or nuclear energy. But framing CCS this way downplays the other reasons why actors may show an interest in it. For example, for fossil actors, CCS represents a chance of survival, prosperity and competitiveness in a carbon-constrained future. In more specialised language, CCS – like other technologies – exhibits ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Pinch and Bijker 1984). Interpretative flexibility suggests that the meaning of the technology varies depending on whose perspective we adopt, and this may matter for what functional performance they seek from it and, eventually, for how it is developed and formed.

BOX 1.2 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGY

In a classic study of technology development, Pinch and Bijker (1984) studied how different social groups in the nineteenth century perceived the early promises of cycling and what different requirements they therefore had for the development of the bicycle. Those interested in using bikes for sport prioritised designs emphasising speed, whereas other groups were more concerned about safety, preserving the reputations of women riders wearing skirts etc. The kind of design we see as a normal bike today is at least in part the result of an interactive process reflecting the interests of different social groups, to varying degrees.

The point here is that different social groups may see a technological artefact in different ways, and that this matters for how it comes to be developed. This suggests that technology does not just develop according to an internal logic, and moreover that knowledge about a technology is, at least in part, in the eye of the beholder. We may call this ‘interpretative flexibility’.

A challenge, then, in developing technology is to construct and present it in a way that allows the forging of social support for the technology. It needs to attract enough interest from enough different actors, and without alienating anyone with the clout to stop it.

The role of CCS as a glue between the climate policy community and the fossil regime means that a heterogeneous coalition of actors with very different objectives in more or less qualified support of the technology has emerged (see Box 1.3). It could even be suggested that the survival, or perhaps revival, of climate change policy as a hot political issue to some degree depends upon the extent to which CCS turns out to be successful. Without a viable CCS option, the political costs of carbon mitigation may simply be too large for some powerful interests.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 An introduction to key developments and concepts in CCS: history, technology, economics and law
• Part I Perceptions and representations
• Part II Governance
• Part III Innovation
• References
• Index