From If to How: The Dynamically Evolving Debate on Carbon Capture and Storage

“As the climate crisis gathers pace, its growing politicisation and the adoption of more ambitious climate goals have added urgency to the question of how we intend to manage emissions that are difficult or impossible to avoid, such as methane emissions from agriculture or emissions from cement production processes. Against this backdrop, CCS is celebrating a renaissance," says Tobias Haas (RIFS), lead author of the study, which was published in the social science journal PROKLA. In their study, the researchers applied an approach based on Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA) to highlight the critical importance of the conflicts surrounding this technology for efforts to achieve the established goal of climate neutrality. HMPA can be used to analyse how specific policies are formulated against the background of competing and contradictory interests of different social forces.

The potential for conflict is underestimated

In the 2000s, coal companies were the main proponents of CCS technologies in Germany, with RWE and Vattenfall taking a leading role in the debate. In the political arena, The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and The Left (Die Linke) were unequivocal in their opposition to CCS. The FDP and the CDU/CSU, on the other hand, initially favoured CCS. The SPD was also largely in favour of the technology.

However, the CCS advocates had underestimated the potential for political and social conflict. This became clear in the state of Schleswig-Holstein in 2009, when RWE commenced seismic blasting off the coast as part of its its exploration of potential storage sites without informing the local population. In the face of persistent protests, the CDU-led state government eventually dropped its support for CCS.
 

A new dynamic

Political debates around CCS have focussed on the potential risks associated with storing carbon. "These relate primarily to the possible, yet highly unlikely scenario of carbon dioxide escaping from storage sites. Such an event would result in an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and would also pose a hazard to health," explains Haas. The high cost of developing and maintaining CCS infrastructure was also criticised.

In recent years, the debate over CCS has shifted significantly. The authors cite four major notable changes in the dynamics driving policy debates compared to the 2000s: Firstly, the climate crisis has worsened significantly – excluding a brief pandemic-related decline, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to grow each year. Secondly, the growing impacts of the climate crisis have pushed it to the top of the political agenda, driven by climate science and, since the late 2010s, by movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the Last Generation. 

Climate Protection Act turns up the pressure

Thirdly, the escalating climate crisis and its politicisation have paved the way for far more ambitious international climate policy. And fourthly, as Haas explains, conflicts over climate policy now extend to areas that were not yet contested in the 2000s: "At that time, the discussion about CCS was primarily about decarbonising the electricity supply. The pressure to reduce emissions in other sectors was still relatively low."

This changed with the Federal Climate Protection Act of 2019, which was tightened further by the German government in 2021: The Act requires a 65 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030 and the attainment of net zero emissions by 2045. To achieve this, sectors such as the cement, steel and chemical industries and the transport sector will also have to massively reduce their emissions.

Key conflicts in climate policy

According to the researchers, CCS and the management of so-called “hard-to-abate emissions” are key conflicts in the climate policy debate. At the heart of this debate is the question of whether CCS will be used simply to escalate the domination of nature to a higher level in order to reconcile the twin goals of economic growth and climate neutrality. Against this backdrop, it seems particularly problematic that both the relevant climate neutrality scenarios and Germany’s Carbon Management Strategy unquestioningly maintain a focus on continued economic growth.

"We run the risk of setting the wrong course here. Instead of adopting a one-sided focus on new technologies, we should be talking a lot more about sufficiency – in other words: a more frugal model of prosperity. If we can reduce the demand for forms of production that are harmful to the climate, we can lower our emissions and the residual emissions that need to be offset would also fall accordingly," says Haas, “The deployment of CCS must not be allowed to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels – in Germany or globally.”

Haas, T., Brad, A., & Schneider, E. (2024). Mit CCS zur Klimaneutralität? Die Renaissance einer umstrittenen Technologie. PROKLA. Zeitschrift für Kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 54(216), 431–450. https://doi.org/10.32387/prokla.v54i216.2134