New Podcast Episode: Public Acceptance of Cross Border Carbon Capture and Storage with Sven Anders

Carbon capture and storage is an effective tool in the global effort to mitigate climate change, but many feel this technology is controversial. How does the public feel about cross-border transport and storage of carbon? Join Sven Anders from the University of Alberta to discuss the public acceptance of cross border carbon capture and storage on the latest episode of the Land Use Podcast.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CHECK OUT THESE RESOURCES:

• Cross-border CO2 transport decreases public acceptance of carbon capture and storage
• NORSAR Ensure- Effective monitoring of long-term site stability for transparent carbon capture and storage hazard assessment

Thank you, Sven Anders, for making this episode possible.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Host: Hi there. Welcome back to the Land Use Podcast. I'm your host, Aysha Wu, with the Alberta Land Institute. This month, we'll be discussing public acceptance of cross-border transportation of carbon capture and storage. 

But before we start, I would like to acknowledge that as part of the University of Alberta, the Alberta Land Institute is situated on Treaty 6 territory and respects the histories, languages, and cultures of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and all first peoples of Canada, whose presence continues to enrich our vibrant community. 

As the planet works towards decarbonization and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, countries need to consider the various technologies at their disposal. Carbon capture and storage is one of these technologies, though often a controversial one. Sven Anders was part of a team that researched how transporting carbon cross-border affects public acceptance of carbon capture and storage. Sven is joining us today to discuss the research. Welcome Sven. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about what you do?

Sven: Okay, my name is Sven Anders. I'm a professor in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental sociology, and my research revolves around various themes, one including energy transition.

Host: Great. Thanks, Sven. Can we start with an overview of carbon capture and why it's important?

Sven: Carbon capture and storage as a(n) energy related technology has been around for quite a while, for several decades, and it has received renewed interest and attention because of its ability to help decarbonize otherwise hard to decarbonize sectors like cement, energy generation, coal-fired power plants and things like this.

Host: And how is carbon capture technology specifically relevant in an Alberta context?

Sven: Well, as we all probably know, Alberta is a very fossil energy intensive province, both producing oil and gas, but also using oil and gas and specifically gas to generate electricity, having other fossil fuel related and chemical industries in the province. And so for Alberta, CCS is a rather huge deal in helping to make the fossil energy sector and its related sectors to more climate friendly, if we like.

Host: Okay, that makes sense. So your research looks at cross-border transportation of carbon. Why would we need to transport carbon?

Sven: Well, if I may take two steps back, so there's a lot of research has been done over those last, let's say, 3 decades on understanding the engineering and science foundations of how we can capture carbon at the point of emission, let's say a coal-fired or a gas fired power plant or a cement facility. And then we need to transport this carbon through pipelines, with trucks or possibly even with ships over oceans, depending on where we want to deposit, where we want to sequester that carbon. And not a lot of research has focused on what different stakeholder groups in that debate think about using CCS. And the aspect of carbon capture and storage that has received the least attention is actually the transport. And Alberta, for instance, does sequester some emissions from the United States. And the debate around CCS is also very lively in Europe and, given the size of the countries and the diversity of industry and the availability of storage space, which actually, in Western Europe is around the North Sea where the UK, the Netherlands and Norway used to have or still have offshore gas and oil deposits. This would involve transporting CO2 across international borders. 

There's various agreements that have existed for a long time which would not allow transporting CO2, because it's considered a waste gas, across an international border. There's an international agreement. It's called the London protocol. You're not allowed to transport CO2 as a waste product across an international border as to prevent the shipping around of waste materials. You know you can think of nuclear waste or other waste, usually the toxic things, right? This agreement has been revised to allow CO2 transport. So we just don't know at this point whether everybody agrees that shipping around CO2 gas for the purpose of CCS is something that everybody agrees is a great idea. So hence this focus on CO2 transport.

Host: Okay, if I'm understanding correctly, then we're basically moving carbon based on who has the capacity to store it?

Sven: Exactly. So you have emissions occurring in one location and you may have storage capacity that is quite far away. So here in Alberta, for instance, we have the trunk line and that is a 100 miles long pipeline that connects the Fort Saskatchewan area and other areas in the province, with an area that has spent gas wells where CO2 gas can be sequestered, and is sequestered and has been for quite a number of years.

Host: So can you explain then why having public support for this kind of thing is important?

Sven: Well, in Canada and in Europe and in the United States, the debate around how should we tackle the urgency of climate change is in full swing and many people will have come across articles that debate the urgency of addressing climate change. Scientists and policymakers, but especially scientists, have come out in the last few years really starting to endorse CCS while usually, it had been sort of, and it still is very controversial in the science area, in the policy area, and also by members of the public. So now with scientists and policy makers going straight for the use and deployment and implementation of CCS at very large national scales, if you like, and in Alberta, we get a lot of attention. You know the Pathway Alliance is a big consortium of major oil firms in the province that want to invest billions of dollars to take advantage of the storage capacity we have here in the province, for instance. 

So with all this going on, it is also a political process of endorsing this specific technology and making it a major contributor to decarbonization of these otherwise very difficult to decarbonize sectors. We're still going to use cement, we're still going to use fossil fuels, we're still going to use other chemical products that are fairly CO2 emission intensive. So hence, more research attention needs to be given to what the public thinks, because members of the public vote for policy and politicians. So if politicians feel that the public may not carry something like the national deployment or the provincial deployment of CCS, there may be consequences when we come back to the ballot box. So there's a link between public acceptance, not necessarily positive support, but at least sort of like tolerance of CCS and the political process and the regulatory process that guides this implementation of CCS.

Host: Okay, so it's going to affect our ability to pass policies and whatnot. 

Sven: Yeah, yeah.

Host: Well, let's get into the research a little bit then. So you, along with two other researchers, looked at how transporting carbon cross-border affects public acceptance of carbon capture and storage. How did you go about researching this topic?

Sven: So together with a colleague in Germany and a colleague in the UK and several graduate students here at the U of A and in my department. We designed a 5 country stretching survey. We conducted a survey online with over 5,500 individuals in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany. zzzzdnd each of these countries has sort of a place in this project because they represent different stages of the deployment of CCS at the national scale. For instance, in Alberta, we already have had CCS for about 10 years with the Shell Quest project and other projects, and related to this trunk line that I spoke about two minutes earlier. Norway in Europe is also leading at the frontier in terms of building offshore CO2 storage capacity. The Netherlands and the UK are very interested in this technology, but their regulatory processes are a little bit further behind. And then Germany is a country that has a lot of emissions through its various industries, but it's probably going to be dependent on its European partners to help get rid of German emissions, if you like, and have them sequestered, maybe in the North Sea by the Dutch, the British or the Norwegians. 

So we designed this large survey. And in this survey, we asked members of the public in each of these countries, including Canada, to participate by answering a number of questions, you know concerns about climate, what they know about CCS, whether they would support it, other views about you know what they feel are benefits and risks or concerns they have. And we did a number of we call them economic experiments where we present people with scenarios or choices of scenarios of what CCS might be looking like and then asking them which of these scenarios would you prefer? Which of these scenarios would you rate higher in terms of acceptance or less likely of finding your acceptance? And as part of these experiments, we also introduced the idea by giving people a definition of what CCS entails, and also then asking them would you accept projects, deployment of CCS in your country or, for instance, even closer, in your province that include imported emissions from, say, for Canada, from our friends in the United States or for you know, in the European case would British respondents accept emissions from Germany being sequestered in, you know, offshore deposits off the coast of England or so. And the shocking result, and we had no hypothesis of what we would find, we found that our scenarios that we presented were largely rated, there was significantly lower rated if there was any notion of imported emissions. Hence the conclusion: the transport across product transport of CO2 is something that many members of the public don't like or reject as part of a CCS deployment strategy.

Host: How did it differ between countries?

Sven: It did not differ so much across 4 out of 5 countries in the sense that the negative effect of suggesting cross-border transport was so large that all the other positive benefits would not be able to compensate for this single negative perception or effect. So let's say if consultation, compensation, other forms of economic benefits, and the positive climate emission reduction benefits of CCS, when we count these positive effects in terms of ratings of scenarios, we presented to people when we would aggregate them, there would be about of the size needed to offset this single negative effect. 

The only outlier, and not really an outlier, is Norway. And Norway, let's say politicians and the public has had a fairly healthy debate about how Norway can take advantage of CCS as a sector in and of itself that would benefit the country economically. And while Norwegian citizens also do not like necessarily or not fully endorsing CCS, they were least concerned about importing emissions from other European countries.

Host: Hmm, interesting. So were a lot of people just opposed to the idea of importing it or…

Sven: So here's our, my colleagues and mine, sort of our layman's interpretation of these results. When we saw this, we were, of course, like shocked that it's so strong and negative. And then we thought, how can we reason, how can we explain this? And if you think about a neighbour relationship, you know, there's people living along the street, would you like to have your neighbours trash or your neighbours garbage bin standing in front of your house? Would you like to have your neighbour take their grass clippings or leaves in the fall now or something else and dump them in your front yard? Would you like to, you know, would you like to take care of the waste of others? So if we go with that metaphor for a moment, it is understandable that people do not like to clean up the mess of other people. And bringing it to CO2, CO2 is a consequence of our daily lives, of our industrial activity and emissions, so why would Canadians be excited about taking care of the luscious lifestyle and the emissions that our friends south of the border in the United States produce? Why shouldn't they take care of their emissions themselves? 

So hence people were quite more accepting of our CCS deployment scenarios when they just included domestic emissions. Only when we said domestic emissions and what about having emissions come from a neighbouring country, that's when people said no way. I'm not supporting this and I'm not finding this acceptable at all.

Host: You may not have looked at this at all, but do you have any idea of if it varied between provinces?

Sven: That was not part of our study. 

Host: Okay.

Sven: We conducted these national studies and we invited people from all across the country. So one of the first questions that we were interested in working with the graduate students here at the University of Alberta, are there differences between Albertans and other Canadians? So we sliced our data to analyze these questions and we found that the respondents, about 200 in our national Canadian sample of about 1,000 individuals were not statistically different from any other Canadian group. So we said maybe people in Ontario think very differently about CSS in the scenarios we showed than Albertans given, you know, our strong ties and our beneficial relationship with the fossil fuel sector. And we could not find evidence of Albertans being different, maybe very small amounts, but again, statistical significance is important in our field, so we could not find anything. 

Host: That's interesting. 

Sven: Yeah, and surprisingly but factually, based on the data we have, that's what we find.

Host: Yeah. Interesting. So, is there any way that we can increase acceptance?

Sven: So this was the, let's say, the objective of the project that we conducted together with a lot of geophysicists that are interested in better understanding the risks and benefits of deployment of CCS, because many people probably do not know or realize front and center that CCS has these decarbonization benefits in terms of sequestering CO2. But like other fossil fuel technologies, it comes at the risk of induced seismicity meaning shallow earthquakes in response to pressing CO2 as a gas deep down into the earth at very high pressures. When we raised this with the members of the general public, people were certainly better informed, but also more aware of these risks. We need to understand that these risks scientifically analyze and scientifically well understood the probability, the chance by which they occur is extremely small. However, not everybody understands, you know, probabilities of, you know, 0.000 per cent and things like this. So this is certainly a factor that drives acceptance. 

So in terms of communication, which is desperately needed in Canada and also the other countries that we studied, we conclude from our survey questionnaires and also talking to other colleagues that are working in this field, there needs to be a more concerted effort of having a transparent, honest and trust instilling conversation with the public about why we are doing is, what are the risks and costs involved, but what are also the benefits that this technology provides, especially maybe in the in the Alberta context. Where continuing to operate fossil fuel extraction and processing of oil and generating energy at large scale is not going to go away anytime soon. So we need CCS, but we also need more clarity in the conversation. Just talking about the benefits is not going to get people convinced that this is a great idea.

Host: Right. So more transparency and more education.

Sven: Yeah, the word education in this context is a bit controversial because in the past people have argued we need to educate the public. Which sounds like a great idea, but also gives the impression that the public is uneducated and people are certainly not uneducated. So I think we need to inform them, we need to increase maybe their understanding, but in a transparent and objective way as opposed to gathering support by, you know, hyping the benefits that this may bring to the Alberta economy and high. Reading the potential risks or downsides of it.

Host: Okay. So in terms of this kind of, I guess maybe raising awareness or something is maybe a better term for the communication to be effective, who should it be coming from? Is it best that it's coming from researchers or government or?

Sven: As a matter of fact. Communication side I find fascinating, but I'm clueless but I, but we do, and this is an important aspect of research and energy transition in the social sciences to ask people about their perceptions of trust, transparency, responsibility, who they would assign responsibility to, who they trust the most and the least. And repeatedly we find in these studies that the public tends to trust researchers and independent research organizations more than any other stakeholder group. So we typically ask research organizations, whether a university or non university research organizations, NGOs in a specific space or political stakeholders from municipalities to province to national. And politicians unfortunately, do not have the greatest, you know, reputation for being transparent or trustworthy on all matters. And so, yeah, people would find universities and research organizations most transparent and trustworthy in terms of conveying these messages.

Host: And you know, my next question was how can other researchers build off of this research? And I feel like you partially answered it there. So probably the communication part, but anything else?

Sven: So part of our research we, the larger consortium in which this research took place, organized a number of workshops mainly focused at the science, the scientists, the social scientists, there weren't that many other than myself pretty much, but there were lots of natural scientists and also engineers to to build a better understanding of what it takes for the scientists to communicate with the public, realizing how much of a dedicated effort science communication needs. It's not something that scientists can do back on the envelope or on in their spare time.

And so our workshops were targeted at educating, if you like, the scientists and researchers on strategies of how to best communicate with members of the public you know avoiding jargon. It is important what impression scientists leave with the public. You know, any sort of notion of arrogance or, you know, people probably don't understand, this is so often not helpful. So training for scientists is important, and having dedicated professionals getting involved in this debate so that they can help breakdown the research results into messages that members of the public can understand to improve their knowledge and their ability to participate in the discussion.

Host: Okay, great. Well, that about wraps things up. So thank you so much for joining us today, Sven.

Sven: Thank you very much.

Host: If you're interested in learning more about this topic, I've linked Sven's research in the description for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, you can leave a like, a comment and subscribe to stay up to date with all of our latest episodes. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, and sign up for our newsletter on albertalandinstitute.ca. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Land Use Podcast.