Not Under Our Back Yards? A case study of social acceptance of the Northern Netherlands CCS initiative

We analyze the decision-making process of the abandonment of a Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) initiative in the Northern-Netherlands. We investigate the social acceptance of the Northern-Netherlands CCS initiative using the results from a survey among the key stakeholders. We find that local opposition can only be held partially responsible for the abandonment of the CCS project. This result differs from the broadly accepted notion “no local public acceptance, no CCS”. Our study finds that the views from key stakeholders regarding the prospects of the CCS initiative were conflicting and this played a role in abandoning the initiative. We conclude that the way in which responsibilities between key stakeholders were arranged has had a dominant impact on the level of acceptance. We recommend that future policy and policy instruments for subsurface activities, like CCS, should be designed in accordance with the object, subject and inter-subject dimension of the decision-making process. In addition there should be a strategic framework, which accounts for the interaction between social-political, market and community acceptance.