Zukünftige Energie- und Industriesysteme
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In the Paris Accord to the UN Climate Change Conference COP21 in 2015, the international community agreed to "make every effort" to reach a significant reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to limit global average temperature rise to preferably 1.5°C by 2100 (UNFCC 2018). A transition to a climate-friendly energy supply, however, would come largely at the expense of coal - a fossil fuel with large global reserves that are also widely dispersed regionally. Therefore, especially since the turn of the millennium, the question has been raised as to how coal could be used in a climate-friendly way in the future. So far, the only way to do this is to apply CCS technology or CCU. CCS involves the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants or industrial sources and its storage underground, such as in deep saline aquifers or in depleted oil and natural gas fields, or their use for enhanced oil or gas recovery (EOR/EGR). When carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) is applied, the CO2 is further used, for example as feedstock for the production of durable plastics. Due to the relatively low potential of CCU compared to CCS (IPCC 2005), only CCS is considered in this thesis.
The majority of studies and roadmaps have discussed CCS as a technology option that could make a significant contribution to achieving the objective of decreasing GHG emissions for many years (IPCC 2014a, 2018). Particularly in the power sector, however, these expectations have not yet been met. As of November 2019, worldwide only two small base-load power plants, capturing a total of 2.4 Mt CO2/year and mainly using it for EOR, are in operation, together with a few pilots in industrial applications and, in particular, natural gas processing (in total 30 Mt CO2/year) (Global CCS Institute 2019).
Early on, it became clear that the predicted high deployment targets and their underlying studies should be critically questioned for various reasons. Particularly due to the lack of a systems-analytical evaluation of this technology (which was relatively new at the time), no reliable answers could be given about the ecological, economic, social and structural effects of its large-scale application. Such analyses are, however, a pre-condition for comprehensively classifying the contribution of a new technology as a promising option for a sustainable energy supply system and assessing it in comparison to other technologies.
To address these challenges, several studies, most of which initiated by the author, were conducted on this topic between 2004 and 2018. The resulting papers became the basis for this thesis.
One of the factors decelerating a further diffusion of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is the public's negative perception of early pilot or demonstration activities in Germany as well as in other countries. This study examined the public perception of CCS in more detail by looking into different options within the CCS chain, i.e. for the three elements capture, transport and storage. This was analyzed using an experimental approach, realized in an online survey with a representative German sample of 1830 citizens. Each participant evaluated one of 18 different CCS scenarios created using three types of CO2 source (industry, biomass, coal), two transport options (pipeline vs. no specification), and three storage possibilities (saline aquifer, depleted gas field, enhanced gas recovery (EGR)).
Overall, we found that the ratings of CCS were neutral on average. However, if the CO2 is produced by a biomass power plant or industry, CCS is rated more positively than in a scenario with a coal-fired power plant. The specifications of transport and storage interacted with each other such that scenarios including EGR or a depleted gas field without mentioning a pipeline were evaluated better than storing it in a saline aquifer or a depleted gas field and mentioning a pipeline as means of transport. Exploratory regression analyses indicate the high relevance of the respective CO2 source in general as well as the perceived importance of this source for Germany.