Public perception of carbon capture and storage: A state-of-the-art overview

Abstract

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology enabling to use fossil fuels in a sustainable way. Therefore, it attracts much attention from the industrial sector, government authorities and scientific community. However, public awareness of the technology is extremely low, and the studies of the lay people's opinion have been launched only during the last decade. Taking into account the role of public support during the implementation of CCS projects, the authors would like to present herein their review of materials on this subject published during 2002–2018 (135 articles). As part of our review, we determined 9 key aspects forming the public perception of CCS. For each of the key aspects, we summarized the available results of the studies. Apart from that, we compared the CCS current status in different countries and provided a number of reasons for involving new countries into the fight against global warming. This work shows that most attention is devoted to CO2 storage; whereas its capture and transportation are poorly studied in terms of public perception. Wider development is required for the methodology enabling a transition from global rhetoric concerning global warming issues to the implementation of particular projects, namely, CCS. The issues related to public awareness of CCS are studied rather thoroughly, but no recommendations are provided regarding the establishment of an optimal database for the lay people. Numerous assessments of general public perception have been carried out. However little attention was paid to the regions with active projects, namely, to the factors considered the most important by the local public, and how actual project results meet their expectations. Therefore, despite an extensive scientific base developed over 17 years, further studies should be aimed at filling the existing gaps. This will enable to improve CCS attractiveness for the public, including the cases when it is compared with alternative low-carbon technologies.

Strategies for mitigation of climate change: a review

“…Risk of leakage and associated negative impacts have also been pointed out by Vinca et al (2018). Other issues related to this technology include public acceptance (Tcvetkov et al 2019;Arning et al 2019) as well as the high deployment costs associated (Vinca et al 2018). Another pathway postcarbon capture is the utilization of the CO 2 captured in the production of chemicals, fuels, microalgae and concrete building materials, as well as utilization in enhanced oil recovery (Hepburn et al 2019;Aresta et al 2005;Su et al 2016;Qin et al 2020).…”

Attitudes on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a Mitigation Technology within the UNFCCC

“…The low rate of deployment of CCS is not primarily related to technical issues but mostly due to policy-and financial-related factors, fueled in large part by a lack of public acceptance of the technology. Public perception of CCS has been a rich subject of research [14][15][16][17][18] and indicates that low levels of awareness and misperceptions around CCS are the main barriers to public acceptance. Most of these studies are targeted to specific groups and/or countries, and few compare attitudes across both developed and developing countries [17,19].…”

Public perception of carbon capture (utilization) and storage projects: world experience and the situation in Russia

“…At the same time, public perception is a social institution consisting of three elements: 1) psychological (feelings, emotions), 2) ethical (morality), 3) relational (awareness) [10]. Using CC(U)S technologies is rather difficult and limited today because of the low awareness of nature and safety level [10,34].…”