SRA-E Lisbon 2017

This paper reports on findings from a two day deliberative workshop with members of the public, held as part of a wider project examining the risks associated with carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS)- a technology designed to help combat climate change by catching CO₂ emissions at source and injecting them deep underground. The workshop explored the ambivalences and anxieties of 12 participants considering a range of CCS technologies, in the context of wider transitions towards a low carbon society. Conducted near Drax Power Station; a plant previously earmarked for retrofitting with CO₂ Capture and Storage (CCS) technology under the UK governments cancelled CCS competition, the workshop aimed to explore perceptions in a community with experience of energy infrastructure and where CCS could plausibly be deployed in the future. Our analysis explores how participants drew on narratives from film and popular culture in order to make sense of CCS technologies, constructing the underground as a highly complex and uncanny space that humans meddle in at their peril. In this view, CCS tended to be viewed as undermining the natural systems and resiliencies upon which human societies depend. We also illustrate how communicating information on climate change and renewable energy intermittency had the effect of rendering these options equally ambivalent, due to the profound disruptions to social systems and desired lifestyles they may entail. While this shift did not reduce anxieties relating to CCS, they did serve to render them more tolerable in the eyes of most participants. In particular we examine how perceptions of naturalness and intuitiveness came to shape how CCS involving bioenergy and industrial capture came to be perceived as less risky, when compared to its use with fossil fuel powered energy generation. These technologies were perceived as enhancing resilience in the face of emergent risks to identities and desired lifestyles from anthropogenic global warming, or, radical changes in behaviour necessitated by energy demand reduction. While not viewed as a panacea, these options were deemed the most preferable among a range of ambiguous options.