PhD Position - Policy Designs for addressing societal acceptance challenges in CCU/CCS demonstration and deployment (RESPONSE DP, ESR 23)

Within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847585, ETH Zurich is offering a 36-month PhD position for an early-stage researcher (ESR) in the area of sustainable energy systems.

Job Description

In light of the Paris Agreement of 2015, several countries recently committed to reaching carbon neutrality within a few decades, e.g. by 2050 in the case of Switzerland. In addition to ambitious action for emission reduction, reaching this goal will likely require negative emission technologies, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU). However, major hurdles for their deployment remain, and the feasibility of industrial-sized CCS/CCU applications remains contested. From a policy point of view, especially the economic and political feasibility need to be considered, given the immense financing needs and acceptance challenges of CCS/CCU.

Against this background, we are looking for a doctoral student working on societal acceptance and policy preferences with respect to large-scale CCS/CCU deployment. In collaboration with a larger project on CCS/CCU demonstrators at ETH Zurich, the student will use public opinion surveys, survey embedded experiments, and focus group approaches to examine: (1) public and stakeholder support for/opposition to storing or utilizing emissions abroad vs. domestically via different types of CCS/CCU to meet Swiss climate policy targets; (2) public and stakeholder preferences over different policy designs (e.g. policy packages combining voluntary and mandatory measures) for incentivizing industry and household demand for CO2 abatement via CCS/CCU; (3) policy feedback effects, i.e. how policy interventions to incentivize CCS/CCU deployment may affect public and stakeholder acceptance and thereby stickiness and ratcheting-up potential of support policies.

A planned secondment of 3 months at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s climate policy unit in Paris is part of the project. During this secondment, the doctoral student will discuss her/his preliminary findings with policy stakeholders, using the extensive network of the OECD. Under the supervision of the partner, the doctoral student will be also be trained in methods for stakeholder consultations and advisory services for policy, and hence learn practical skills that complement the academic education.

The anticipated outcomes of this project are publications in high-impact academic journals, with important results for policy advice related to CCS/CCU.