Professor Kate J. Neville published From Capture to Conversion: A Critical Review of the Development of Carbon Capture Conversion and Utilization Technology.
This review article asks how scholars and decision-makers evaluate CCCU as a climate change mitigation technology and consider its potential consequences. We survey the literature on CCS and CCCU technologies, drawing on lessons and experiences from around the world, with a focus on high-emitting countries, especially in North America. Given the limited critical work we find on CCCU, we turn to studies on CCS, (considered as a precursor to CCCU) that challenge techno-economic approaches to inform our analysis of the possibilities, limitations, and barriers. Adopting a broader historical perspective enables us to assess how negative emissions discourses and practices unfold, where new technologies might replicate or disrupt existing power structures, and what their social and environmental outcomes might be. We focus our review on the power and justice dynamics of CCS and CCCU. While current research focuses on how to increase social acceptance of these often-contested emerging technologies, we argue for the need to consider these as techno-institutional complexes and to use a justice lens to understand them further.
We undertake this review first by contextualizing the technological development of CCS and CCCU and highlighting their roles in energy transition and climate mitigation strategies. We then outline an integrated justice lens and its constitutive elements of distributional, procedural, capabilities-based, and recognitional justice (Jones et al. 2015; McCauley et al. 2019; Wijsman and Berbés-Blázquez 2022) and apply this framework to review work on CCS and CCCU technologies. We conclude by considering the questions and approaches that are needed to ensure CCCU technologies do not replicate or intensify existing injustice, while charting a path forward for policy makers and researchers.