Catch it if you can - A bottom-up study about the future for CCS in Sweden, by examining the drivers and barriers for climate strategies of high emitting companies

Sammanfattning

Global, as well as Swedish scenarios of how to reach the goals stated in the Paris Agreement all point towards Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a part of the solution. Although several high emitting companies in Sweden pose the opportunities to implement CCS, there are still no full-scale CCS installations in Sweden today. Nevertheless, how these actors plan and prioritize for the future will have implications for how the future unfolds. This qualitative study invites the Swedish actors' perspective to the CCS debate and explores their climate strategies to enhance the understanding of whether there is, or is not, a future for CCS in Sweden. Semi- structured interviews were conducted with 22 actors with large point sources of emissions (>100 ktons CO2/ year) within the energy, industry, and waste sectors. The results were analysed through three theoretical perspectives to understand the drivers and barriers behind actors' climate strategies: institutional theory, resource-based theory, and resource dependency theory. The findings from this study imply that actors with fossil emissions tend to have innovative climate strategies, and companies with biogenic emissions tend to have compensatory strategies. Innovators prioritise CCS as means to reach their climate goals. These actors are influenced by norms and cognition and are driven by their perceived role as having great responsibility to contribute to Sweden's climate goals. In contrast, actors with a compensatory strategy do not feel the same pressure and responsibility and are thus willing to contribute voluntarily. For actors with the ability to acquire the right resources, there seems to be a future for CCS in Sweden. Although it hinges upon institutional factors to create the conditions for a successful implementation. If sufficient regulations to create a negative emissions framework are in place, innovators will most likely implement CCS in the near future (before 2030). Compensators will most likely wait until their cognitive pressure increases or until the general discussion about carbon emissions also includes biogenic emissions. By then, if innovators have implemented CCS, the compensators can mimic their behaviour.