Show summary
Achieving the Paris Agreement and net-zero targets requires the rapid diffusion of multiple decarbonization technologies. Several of these technologies are expected to expand across heterogeneous sectors simultaneously. Carbon capture is one such technology. Once primarily framed as a solution for emissions from coal- and gasfired power plants, carbon capture is now framed as a technology for handling emissions across a variety of sectors. This includes waste incineration, biopower, blue hydrogen, and various process industries, like cement. While many mitigation scenarios envision an expansion from today’s limited carbon capture capacity to capturing several billion tonnes of CO₂ annually within decades, real-world deployment has been slow and uneven. Despite the technology’s potential importance across several sectors, social science research on carbon capture has largely focused on public acceptance rather than broader innovation and diffusion dynamics.
From innovation studies, we know that how technologies are shaped, developed, and spread stems from both individual actors and firms and from the broader context – including specific technological characteristics, actor networks, and institutional and economic structures. These broader structures of actors, networks, and institutions are what we refer to as a technology’s innovation system. Similarly, we know that different sectors and industries have distinct characteristics and innovation modes. They consist of different actors and networks, and individual sectors have different opportunities and ways of doing things. For instance, some sectors are resource-rich, innovative, and accustomed to taking risks, while others have lower profit margins and are more risk-averse. These differences in characteristics imply that when a technology spreads and its innovation system starts to integrate a variety of sectors – all with their own particular needs, wants, and ways of doing things – the technology and its innovation system (its actors, actor networks, and institutions) may have to change and adapt to be compatible with the sectors’ way of doing things.
With this in mind, this thesis explores how interactions with multiple sectors influence carbon capture technology, the broader innovation system around it, and its diffusion dynamics. Rooted in the fields of innovation studies and sustainability transitions, this thesis investigates (1) how a multi-purpose decarbonization technology, like carbon capture, diffuses to new user sectors, (2) how simultaneous interactions with multiple sectors reshape the technology and its innovation system, and (3) how material characteristics of the technology (like its size and complexity) both influence and are influenced by these processes.
Empirically, the thesis draws on a series of qualitative case studies of carbon capture in Norway during a period where the focus shifted from natural gas and power generation to waste-to-energy, cement, hydrogen production, and other energyintensive industries.
The thesis draws on a range of academic literatures, theoretical frameworks, and key concepts, including the technological innovation systems (TIS) framework, research on technological diffusion and technology characteristics, and scholarship on how innovation systems and technologies couple with and embed in new user sectors. Building on these strands, several of my papers develop analytical frameworks to examine how technologies such as carbon capture expand into new sectors and how concurrent cross-sector interactions shape both the technologies themselves and the innovation systems surrounding them.
As such, the thesis provides conceptual tools for analyzing multi-sector interactions and the diffusion dynamics of multi-purpose technologies. By employing these frameworks in its case studies, the thesis contributes to the technological innovation systems and diffusion literatures by foregrounding sectoral interactions in diffusion and the co-evolution of technology characteristics and innovation systems. The thesis finds that diffusing across multiple sectors simultaneously is a complex process that pulls an innovation system in different directions. This leads to changes in both the broader innovation system (e.g., in terms of which actors are involved, how actors are organized, project structures, contract types, how and which knowledge is developed, etc.) and to the material characteristics of the technology itself, as technology developers try to adapt to new users. Spreading to new user sectors becomes a long, expensive process as actors try to align the structures of the innovation system and the characteristics of the technology to the structures and needs of new user sectors and vice versa. When spreading across multiple sectors simultaneously, this process becomes even more challenging, as differing visions of the future pull the innovation system in different directions, complicating the process and risking fragmentation into multiple segments. To reduce risk, cost, and uncertainty, technology developers actively work to adapt the technology to the new users’ needs. Since these processes can be long and resource-intensive, a strong shared directionality (in terms of actors’ beliefs and motivations) is key to initiating and maintaining the diffusion process. For example, in the case of carbon capture, actors in both the innovation system and the new user sectors adopted and maintained the narrative that carbon capture is a key technology for industrial decarbonization.
By studying carbon capture, the thesis also contributes by unpacking the innovation and diffusion dynamics of a potentially important decarbonization technology that has received limited attention in social science studies. By studying how carbon capture spread and was affected by its adoption in new sectors in Norway, I derive a few lessons for supporting the further development and diffusion of carbon capture and similar technologies. This includes focusing on policies that de-risk the diffusion process for first-mover actors in new user sectors, e.g., through governmentsupported demonstration projects in new sectors, or contracts for difference. or through sector-specific policies. The thesis also highlights the importance of being attentive to user-sector characteristics when designing policies to support mitigation technologies. Since user sectors may have different institutional challenges, technology-focused policies alone may fall short. In some cases, measures tailored to specific user sectors may be more effective at promoting the diffusion of a technology than technology-specific policies. For example, green procurement programs for cement can incentivize carbon capture in the cement sector.
