The participation of the project’s consortium in the GHGT10 conference

Amsterdam RAI, 19-23rd September 2010

The 10th conference on Greenhouse Gas Technologies, held in Amsterdam, was seen as a great opportunity to present the outcomes of our project.

The consortium submitted three abstracts to the GHGT10 programme committee for consideration as papers and all of them were accepted for oral presentation. That was a great success for our project considering the large amount of papers that were submitted for evaluation.

The paper derived from the evaluation of WP2 results, is entitled “Scrutinizing the impact of CCS communication on opinion quality: Focus Group Discussions versus Information-Choice Questionnaires: Results from experimental research in six countries”. Recognising the low awareness and public knowledge level and the formation of pseudo-opinions from the traditional surveys, in this paper a comparison is made between two communication methods, Focus group discussions and Information-Choice Questionnaires.

Regarding the results of the WP3, those were presented by two different papers. The first one included the results from all the participating countries. The title “Public Awareness and Perceptions of Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS): Insights from Surveys Administered to Representative Samples in Six European Countries” was the most appropriate as the purpose of the results was to provide an insight of the public’s awareness level regarding energy related issues and the perception people have for CCS technologies.

In four of the participating countries (Norway, UK, Germany and the Netherlands), apart from the national surveys, regional surveys were also conducted. It was about the assessment of the perceived risks and benefits of current proposal for CO2 capture, transport and Storage (CCS) in each of the regions. It was found that national-level differences are usually more important than within-nation differences, although the greater awareness of CCS lays within the regions, and more negative views towards onshore infrastructure, especially in Germany. More information can be found in the paper “Measuring regional attitudes towards proposed CCS plants: A Four Country Comparison”, also presented in GHGT10 conference.

The importance of their results was highlighted in the daily bulletin issued by the GHGT10 team. The first comments were on the presentation of the results of the comparative study of CCS communication methods by Dancker Daamen from Leiden University. It refers to the different ways to measure high quality opinions and to everyone’s agreement that the information provided should be objective and balanced. Dancker commented that “We executed the best focus group set-up possible, as well as an ICQ in different 6 countries. What we found was that quality of the opin¬ion was good with both methods, but better with the ICQ.”

The next day’s bulletin refers to Katja Pietzner’s presentation as a “scoop to the GHGT10”. In the presentation, it was commented that “…a majority of 60% said that they have never heard on CCS. Less than 10% said that they had heard quite a bit on CCS...” numbers that are overestimated by other social science studies. The conclusion that “We found that in countries with a lower awareness the perception of CCS was more slightly more positive” raised questions from the audience contradictory nature of it. But that was something that was also discussed in other places in the conference. Despite that, everyone agreed that the methodology was of good quality and it definitely will have an added value for trend analysis and regional differences.

For more information, please check the following link: www.ghgt.info

The corresponding papers are in print and will be soon be available in our project’s website: www.ccs-communications.gr