Societal and Economic Impacts of CCUS

Despite decades of fiscal and corporate investment, carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) has failed to make an impact on global climate change mitigation. Recent climate events have led to the UN upgrading 'global warming' to 'global boiling' and renewed efforts are being made to accelerate interventions, including CCUS. Many new mitigation technologies focus only on the specific environmental credentials of the process with little thought being given to consequential impacts such as financial costs or the societal impact of change. If the technological intervention has a large economic impact to the end user, then a situation may result that lower income communities become financially burdened or even excluded from participating in certain activities. In such cases, rather than creating a just transition we may be creating new social underclasses.

The goal of this Research Topic is to raise the profile of social impact in decision making for the development of CCU processes. We aim to examine a series of methodologies for the assessment of developing technologies over a range of technology levels (TRLs). The topic is aimed at academics, industrialists and policy makers seeking to make informed decisions in a transition away from the counterfactual scenarios of fossil carbon-based supply chains. By examining a range of scenarios and technologies, the topic aims to develop a whole system approach where the social and economic impacts are considered alongside the environmental impacts, ensuring that unintended negative consequences are avoided. An important additional goal will be to compare and contrast utilisation or conversion technologies against storage and enhanced oil recovery alternatives.

Technology development is at the center of success. However, technology is often proposed without considering the consequences, unintentional or otherwise. The scope of this topic is wide ranging, however there are certain areas for which we are looking for enhanced detail and strategies:

• different approaches to carbon dioxide capture (both point source and direct air capture);
• synthetic transport fuels;
• accelerated mineralization to construction products;
• emerging petrochemical replacements;
• production of fast-moving consumer goods;
• storage in geological formations;
• storage in non-geological structures;
• whole system approaches;
• policy development and advocacy;
• behavioral change in a transition;
• financial and fiscal support for the transition;
• Theory of Change.

It is appreciated that this in cross-disciplinary and so reviewers will be briefed in advanced to look at the holistic nature of the expected papers and the editors will take a sympathetic put pragmatic to the content of the papers. We expect that submitted papers will contain significant content from social sciences and psychology disciplines.