In May 2024, Florian Auclair successfully defended his doctoral research etitled "Social acceptability of negative emissions technologies : Comparison of the deployment of two BECCS projects in Sweden and England". His manuscript is available here, and the summary of his work is presented below :
One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is the climate emergency caused by the excessive quantities of carbon dioxide emissions generated by human activities since the Industrial Revolution. To reduce or even avoid this climate change, several solutions exist, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. These can be combined with bioenergy production sources to form BECCS (BioEnergy with CCS) systems, which have the advantage of both producing energy in the form of electricity or heat, and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This latter feature, also known as negative emissions production, is considered essential by several international bodies such as the IPCC to reduce the greenhouse effect.
However, this innovation raises a number of controversies. From threats to biodiversity to the risks of geological carbon storage to the fair distribution of national resources, BECCS is far from being unanimously supported. All these social debates, grouped together under the heading of social acceptability, are today one of the main phenomena limiting the deployment of the technology. This thesis compares two BECCS projects currently being integrated in Europe, one in England and the other in Sweden. By analysing in an original way, the influence of national and local contexts on the formation of debates, our investigation leads us towards a bi-axial understanding of these socio-technical realities. The phenomena of acceptability, far from being monolithic, are multiple and varied. On the one hand, they are positioned horizontally, along the value chain of these processes, from the source of CO2 emissions to underground storage. On the other hand, they also evolve vertically, depending on whether the issues at stake in the debates concern the technological sector in general or the territorial integration of a particular project.
Contrary to popular belief in industrial and political circles, the nuisance caused by BECCS is far from being the main obstacle to its implementation. Our study has identified three obstacles that merit further research. Firstly, the right scale of deployment for this technology: too small and it would not have the expected effect on the climate, and too big and the conflicts of use and unavailability of resources would block its construction. Secondly, the distribution of skills across the BECCS value chain also restricts its deployment. Few countries have the technical, material and political capacity to develop the upstream and downstream parts of the chain. International cooperation, with the diplomatic and geopolitical risks inherent in such an undertaking, seems essential to us. Finally, BECCS acts downstream from the production of CO2 emissions when these have already been emitted. Without decoupling economic activity from anthropogenic emissions, the absorption capacity of BECCS could be exceeded by the quantities released into the atmosphere, thus diminishing the value of this solution. Combined deployment with other solutions directly limiting emissions is therefore necessary to guarantee the usefulness of BECCS.
