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Energy Procedia 4 (2011) 63456352

Energy
Procedia
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Energy Procedia 00 (2010) 000000

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GHGT-10

Public acceptance of subsea underground carbon storage

Kyogo Amikawaa, Shinichiro Hirabayashib, Toru Satob*
a

Department of Systems Innovations, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-, Japan
Department of Ocean Technology, Policy, and Environment, University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa 277-8563, Japan
Elsevier use only: Received date here

revised date here; accepted date here

Abstract
Public acceptance of subsea underground carbon storage was investigated by means of questionnaire survey and online
discussions. In the questionnaire survey, the public acceptance of CCS was quantified by the conjoint analysis in comparison
with other zero-emission energy sources. It was suggested that thermal energy with CCS may be preferred to renewable energy if
the cost of the former is cheaper than that of the latter by 0.26 $/kWh. However, it was also found that the backgrounds of
respondents of the questionnaire have significant effect on the results of the analysis. In the online discussion, arguments on
CCS by the ordinary people and published reports of representative environmental organizations are quantitatively analyzed and
their characteristics are quantified by 2 parameters: the stance point and the influence factor. It was found that the concerns on
CCS vary depending on the characteristics of the organization. As for public acceptance, environmental organizations pay much
less attention to it than the ordinary people.
c 2011

by Elsevier
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Keywords: ocean CO2 storage; public acceptance; questionnaire survey; conjoint analysis; logical analysis; risk communication

Introduction
CO2 storage in the subsea geological formation is regarded as one of the effective options of carbon capture and
storage (CCS) for mitigating global warming attributed to anthropogenic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. In this
storage option, CO2 captured in the massive emission site such as thermal power plants and cement production
factories is injected in the stable geological formation underneath the seafloor, aiming at its safe storage for more
than 1000 years. However, as can be seen in most of other storage options, there are risks associated with this
process. The most serious risk which can be considered at the moment is the seepage of sequestrated CO2 through
unknown faults or abandoned wells and the consequent local impacts on surrounding marine environments. For this
reason, strong antipathy may exist among stakeholders against the implementation of this technology. Therefore,
sufficient public acceptance is required, even though the impacts have been proven to be trivial. For judging whether
the implementation of this technology is accepted or not, it is definitely important to make stakeholders perceive this
technology itself and associated benefits and risks. A thorough discussion on the goodness and the badness of its
implementation by the people on both sides is also considered to be effective.
There have been researches on the public acceptance of CCS. Itaoka et al. [1] conducted 2 questionnaire surveys
on CCS and extracted important factors for public acceptance. Best-Waldhober et al. [2] investigated the public
doi:10.1016/j.egypro.2011.02.651

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opinions to 6 options of CCS implementation in Europe. Kamishiro and Sato [3] carried out questionnaire survey
and web discussion on the CO2 storage into the ocean. There are researches of analyzing the opinions of NGOs
which may have significant effect on the public opinions (e.g. Anderson and Chiavari [4]). Other than CCS, public
acceptance was concerned in the fields of nuclear energy and genetically-modified foods (e.g. Siegrist et al. [5]).
In this study, a questionnaire survey on the acceptance of CCS was conducted to investigate the public
acceptance of this storage option in comparison with other options for mitigating global warming by means of the
conjoint analysis. At first, the respondents of the questionnaire were given general information on the CCS and the
subsea underground storage technology including its benefits and risks. Then they were asked to choose the
appropriate combination of mitigation options among subsea underground storage, renewable energy and nuclear
energy in relation with the choices of the corresponding electricity fee. As a result of the conjoint analysis of the
answers, the acceptance of each option and the acceptable rise of electricity fee accompanied with its
implementation were quantitatively analyzed.
In addition, discussion on the benefits and risks concerned with the subsea underground CO2 storage reported in
articles and websites were collected and studied by a logical analysis method. Several materials which support or
oppose this technology were selected from representative environmental organizations and their opinions were
categorized according to the quantitative contribution to each social and political topic related to this storage
technology. Risk communication was also put to trial through a website in the present study. On this website, the
way individuals perceive various topics related to this technology was analyzed through the arguments written on
the bulletin board system (BBS). Such studies may provide us with a prior grasp of the issues that will arise in the
practical phase in the research and development phase instead. This is effective because the issues of most concern
can be known in advance and thus it becomes possible to invest research funds efficiently in the R&D phase.
Therefore, evaluating public acceptance and understanding people's awareness of the issues in the R&D phase are
important in enabling the spread of this technology in the future.

1. Questionnaire survey on public perception of CCS

The target of questionnaire survey was confined to undergraduate and postgraduate students in Australia, Japan,
Korea, Norway, Taiwan, UK and USA. In advance of questions on CCS, each respondent was asked nationality, age,
sex, and research topic in order to take their characteristics into consideration. Self-rating questions about their
interests and knowledge on global warming and CCS issues were followed as shown in Fig.1.
In the main part of questionnaire, a consciousness survey on CCS was carried out in comparison with other zeroemission technologies. 16 orthogonal profiles of the electricity fee and the proportion of renewable energy, nuclear
energy and thermal energy with CCS were designed and they were divided into 4 groups of 4 profiles. In each
question, the respondents were inquired to choose the most preferable profiles among 4 profiles.
The answers to questionnaire were able to be recovered from 62 respondents. In analyzing the result of
questionnaire survey for the public consciousness of CCS, the conjoint analysis was adopted. In the conjoint
analysis, the importance degree of each attribute can be obtained by

Ij =

maxk ajk - mink ajk

,
j (maxk ajk - mink ajk)

(1)

where I is the importance degree and ajk is the partial utility of attribute j and level k. Fig. 2 shows the importance
degree of each attribute as a result of the conjoint analysis under the condition that the electricity fee is between $75
and $160 and the compositions of electricity are 0 to 50 percent for renewable energy and nuclear energy,
respectively. It can be found that people regard the importance of the electricity twice as much as that of the
electricity composition. The marginal willingness to pay was 0.74 $/percent which means that the respondents are
willing to pay additional $0.74 per month to shift 1 percent of thermal energy with CCS to renewable energy. In
other words, it can be said that CCS with thermal energy will be preferred to renewable energy if the cost of the
former is cheaper than that of the latter by about 0.26 $/kWh.

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Fig. 1 The first section of questionnaire.

70
60
50
40
[% ]
30
20

E lectricity

50% from

50% from

fee

Therma l with

Therma l w ith

$160

CCS

CCS

$75

R enew a ble

N uclea r

6 4 .7%

2 8 . 0%

7 . 3%

10
0

Fig. 2 Importance degrees of attributes: electricity, renewable energy, and nuclear energy.
The result of the conjoint analysis may be affected by the characteristics of the respondents. In order to take this
effect into consideration, the respondents were categorized into groups according to their attributes and conjoint
analysis was applied to each group. The MWTP to shift 1 percent of thermal energy with CCS to renewable energy
was 1.24 $ for respondents who have little knowledge on global warming, while it was 0.47 $ for respondents who
have great knowledge on global warming. Compared with the 0.74 $ from the analysis of all the respondents,
knowledge on global warming is considered to have an effect of decreasing MWTP. In other words, people who

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have more knowledge on global warming is less reluctant to introduce CCS. The similar trend can be seen in the
knowledge on CCS: The MWTPs were 0.99 $ and 0.60 $ for respondents who have little knowledge and good
knowledge on CCS, respectively. From this analysis, it can be considered that the knowledge of global warming and
CCS are influential factors for public acceptance of CCS. It is suggested that increasing perception of global
warming and CCS may lead to achieve higher acceptance.
2. Analysis of discussion on CCS
A web discussion on CCS was performed to investigate its public acceptance by the logical analysis. The
discussion took place in a bulletin board system (BBS) opened in a web server. Only the respondents of the
questionnaire were invited to take part in the discussion in the BBS. In advance of the discussion, the participants
were given basic information on CCS including its benefits and risks. The discussions were made on the following 5
themes: (1) Environmental ethics, (2) Technology, (3) CCS in the future, (4) standardization and (5) the results of
the questionnaire. The BBS was open for about 2 months and totally 24 opinions were collected.
Additionally, published documents and reports of environmental organizations were analyzed in order to
investigate various positive and negative opinions on CCS. Especially, the opinions of some influential
organizations may directly or indirectly change the public opinions and their influence on the public acceptance is
considered to be significant. In this study, 8 published documents were selected from 8 environmental organizations.
The selected organization and documents were listed in Table 1. As a reference, another online discussion on CCS
was chosen as listed in Table 1.
In order to quantify the characteristics of each organization, attention rate (AR) of each document was calculated.
AR is defined as the rate of attention to a specific topic. The topics selected for this analysis were technology, risk,
costs, CO2 source, climate change, contribution, framework, project, and public acceptance. For each organization,
the number of lines of arguments on each topic was counted and normalized by the number of total lines. Once AR
was obtained, stance point (SP) was calculated by the following formula:
SPj = 100 ARij Rating ,
i

(2)

where ARij is the AR of organization j on topic i and Rating is the degree of positive stance expressed by 5 ranks of
0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 where 0 means negative. From Eq. 2, SP of each organization can be obtained as a value
between 0 and 100. Another factor for charactering each organization is its influence to public. In this study, this
factor is quantified as influence factor (IF) by the number of Google search results when the organization name is
searched. It should be noted that this quantification is based on the assumption that the influences of organizations
are reflected on how much they are referred in other websites and online documents. Since the numbers of search
results ranged widely among organizations, their common logarithms were taken to obtain IFs. Fig. 3 is a diagram
where each organization was plotted by its IF and SP. This diagram is called IF-SP diagram hereafter. It can be said
Fig.3 roughly shows the characteristics of each organization. For example, it can be seen that IPCC and Greenpeace
are very influential which does not contradict ordinary perception. It is also noted that Greenpeace and NOAH are
found to be against CCS while Bellona and IEA GHG support it.

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Table 1 Selected organizations and documents.

Organization
IPCC
IEA GHG
ACCAT
WWF UK
Bellona
Foundation
Greenpeace
NOAH
McKinsey &
Company

Document
Special Report on CCS
(Technical Summary) [6]
Carbon Capture and Storage Meeting
the Challenge of Climate Change [7]
Accelerating the Deployment of Carbon
Abatement Technologies
(Executive Summary) [8]
Evading Capture Report
Why CO2 Capture and Storage is an
Important Strategy to Reduce Global
CO2 Emissions [9]
False Hope [10]
NOAHs position on CCS as a climate
change tool [11]
Carbon Capture & Storage: Assessing
the Economics [12]
Citizens Against CO2 Sequestration
Web discussion on CCS
(present study)

year

Document type

2005

Report

2008

Report

2009

Advisory
document

2008

Report

2007

Position paper

2008

Report

2009

Position paper

2008

Report

2009

BBS

2009

BBS

Influence factor
8
Greenpeace

IPCC

McKinsey

6
NOAH

Citizens

IEA GHG

WWF UK

Bellona

4
ACCAT

3
2
1

Negative

20

Web
discussion

0
40
60
Stance point

80

Positive

Fig. 3 IF-SP diagram of each organization.

100

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Fig. 4 shows IF-SP diagrams of ARs on technology and public acceptance, respectively. From Fig. 4 (a), it is
implied that even negative organizations do not blame much on CCS technologies. From Fig. 4 (b), it is found that
both positive and negative organizations pay much less attention to public acceptance than citizens shown in the
BBSs. Fig. 5 shows specific arguments among organizations on the necessity of CO2 reduction and environmental
risks of CCS, respectively, shown in the SP-IF diagrams. From the argument in Fig. 5 (a), it is found that both
positive and negative organizations agree on the point that more than 50 % reduction of CO2 emission is needed by
2050. From Fig. 5 (b), it can be seen that the positive organizations emphasize that leakage of sequestrated CO2 will
not occur while negative organizations and citizens are anxious about the consequence after the leakage.

Influence factor
10
IPCC

Greenpeace

IEA GHG

WWF UK

Citizens

McKinsey

4
NOAH

Bellona
ACCAT
Discussion

0
0

20

40

60

100

80

-2
Negative

Positive

Stance point

a)

Influence factor
10
Greenpeace

IPCC

8
6

Citizens

WWF UK

IEA GHG
McKinsey

NOAH

ACCAT

Bellona

2
Discussion

0
0

20

40

60

100

80

-2
Negative

Stance point

Positive

b)
Fig. 4 IF-SP diagrams of ARs on (a) technology and (b) public acceptance.

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Global gas
emissions must
be cut by at
least 50% by
2050 compared
to 1990 levels.

7
6

Greenpeace

Bellona
5
4

Global CO2
emissions must be
reduced by 50 to
80% by 2050 and
a delay will have
severe
consequences.

UK has to reach
80% reduction
by 2050.

ACCAT
2
1
0
0

20

40

60

80

100

a)
Greenpeace

Influence factor

It is unclear how
severe the CCSs
threat to health,
ecosystems and
the climate will
be.

Leakage
could cause the
pollution of water
supplies or
damages to
ecosystems.

IPCC

CO2 release is
likelyto be
detected quickly
and stopped
using techniques
that are
Further work is available today.
needed to give
confidence that
storage in saline
aquifers would not
have adverse
environmental
consequences.

WWF UK

Offshore
subsea
monitoring is
needed.

Citizens
ACCAT

Web discussion

Negative

CCS seems to have

large influences to
the nature and
mankind cannot be
responsible for all.

Stance point

Positive

b)
Fig. 5 IF-SP diagrams of specific arguments on (1) necessity of CO2 reduction and (b) environmental risks of
CCS.

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3. Conclusion
In this study, the public acceptance of CCS by subsea underground CO2 storage was investigated by means of
the quantitative analysis of questionnaire survey and the web discussions. Conjoint analysis of questionnaire survey
shows that CCS will be preferred if the cost of thermal energy is cheaper than renewable energy by 0.26 $/kWh. It
was also shown that the people with more knowledge on global warming and CCS have a tendency to accept CCS
more easily. In the analysis of web discussion, representative environmental organizations are characterized by their
stance toward CCS and influence to the public. It was found that there was a big difference of point between
positives and negatives in the argument on CCS risks while they seem to almost agree on the point of the necessity
of CO2 reduction. It was also found that the attention to public acceptance was much less in the documents of
environmental organizations than that in the discussion of citizens. From the result of this study, the important factor
to achieve better acceptance of CCS is suggested as (1) increasing public perception of global warming and CCS,
(2) bridging opinion which connects the arguments of positives and negatives, and (3) providing information on
what is concerned by the public.
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[4] Anderson J, Chiavari J. Understanding and improving NGO position on CCS. Energy Procedia 2009; 1:48114817.
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Abatement Technologies, 2009.
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[10] http://www.bellona.org/ccs.
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[12] NOAH. NOAH's position on CCS as a climate change tool, 2009.
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