German industry faces enormous challenges: the goal to reach climate neutrality by 2045, high energy prices, higher interest rates, and geopolitical tensions. Although reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the prime climate mitigation strategy, unavoidable or hard-to-abate emissions will remain even after 2045. Reaching climate neutrality and securing the competitiveness of German industry will hence require carbon capture and storage (CCS). 

Yet, there are significant barriers to CCS deployment, most prominently political neglection (viz. lack of sufficient political attention and a reputational problem), a policy and legal bottleneck where private actors require political action to advance projects, uncertainty due to lack of coordination by the state, and missing know-how.

This paper develops policy recommendations to overcome those challenges, namely crafting a nuanced, yet positive, CCS narrative, a cluster strategy for CCS that allows for scalability, coordination by the state, and changing public perception from “Not under my backyard” (NUMBY) to “Yes under my backyard” (YUMBY).

Read the full title: „CCS and Climate Neutrality: Developing a Pathway for Germany” here as PDF.