Carbon Capture and Storage in the United States: Perceptions, Preferences, and Lessons for Policy

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) are a set of technologies that capture carbon dioxide (CO2), transport it and store it in suitable underground geological formations for permanent storage. By reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, CCS technologies can contribute to mitigating climate change. Despite the slow and limited development of CCS projects to date, the technology plays an important role in several climate change mitigation scenarios. Many scenarios produced by Integrated Assessment Models compatible with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees feature a high amount of emissions mitigated trough CCS technologies. This has produced debates in the scientific community, due to the limited knowledge available on the technical but also social and political feasibility of a large-scale deployment of CCS. Investigating public attitudes towards CCS is therefore crucial, but research on the public perception of these relatively new technologies is still limited. In this study we aim at contributing to understanding public attitudes towards CCS, focusing on more ‘traditional’ CCS technologies that capture CO2 produced by industrial processes and fossil fuel power plants. We employ a demographically representative sample of 1,520 US residents to make available more recent data on CCS knowledge and perception in the United States, where most existing industrial scale CCS projects are operating. We find that awareness and knowledge of CCS are extremely low, with only 19 % of respondents in our sample having heard of CCS before. Then, employing a conjoint experiment, we show how support for policies to scale up CCS crucially depends on specific policy design features. Policies to scale up CCS can take various forms, such as bans on the construction of new fossil fuel power plants without CCS, government subsidies for CCS development, or increases in taxes on fossil fuel power generation without CCS. We find that bans and subsidies are significantly more supported than increases in taxes. Moreover, policy support linearly decreases with policy costs and increases with minimal distance requirements of CCS plants from residential areas. Interestingly, policy implementation in 2020 or 2030 is preferred over later policy implementation. The results of this study provide important insights on public attitudes towards CCS. In particular, the low familiarity of respondents with CCS and the evidence of how support for policies to scale up these technologies depends on specific policy instrument and varies with political orientation should be taken into account in the formulation of public policies and the design of decarbonization scenarios.