Colloquium: Fighting Carbon Emissions with Technology - Public Preferences for CCS in Germany

Abstract: Political pressure to achieve net-zero CO2 objectives has heightened the need to evaluate available mitigative technology options, including the direct removal of industrial point emissions. Among a plethora of decarbonization approaches Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has emerged as a technically viable and increasingly essential component of net-zero CO2 strategies. However, CCS has not been without controversy. Its close alignment with fossil fuel sectors has some criticizing the possibility of enhanced oil recovery (Whitmarsh et al. 2019). Others argue its relatively high investment and per-unit cost of CO2 removed make CCS uncompetitive against renewable low-carbon technologies (Wilberforce et al. 2021). On the other side of the debate, growing numbers of science experts and policymakers argue that CCS has become essential to meeting the ambitious climate commitments reached at the recent COP agreement (Global CCS Institute 2022).

Despite all the attention, little is known about how the public (e.g, in Germany or Canada) perceives CCS deployment. This study employs data from large-scale stated preference experiments with n=5400 participants in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK to measure public acceptance of national CCS deployment within a Best-Worst Scaling experiment (Louviere 1987). We asked respondents to rank seven alternative climate change mitigation policies (i.e., increase the share of renewable energy, nurture forest landscapes, end fossil fuel subsidies, put a price on CO2 emissions, CCS, enforce reductions in personal vehicle transport to encourage public transportation, and force households to adopt energy efficiency measures for home heating and electricity consumption.

We analyze the resulting individual stated preference data using random parameter logit. Questions over whether climate and emission mitigation preferences are influenced by respondents’ socio-economic stays or political orientation were analysed using a fractional multinomial logit model. Our results reveal a number of relevant policy implications for integrating CCS into a broader portfolio of decarbonization strategies while accounting for within- and cross-country variations.