The Industrial Politics of Carbon Dioxide Removal in the EU (IPOL-CDR)

Project Lead: Etienne Schneider
Project Partners: Alina Brad (University of Vienna), Wim Carton (Lund University), Jens Friis Lund (University of Copenhagen), Nils Markusson (Lancaster University), Jonas Meckling (UC Berkeley), 
Projekt Website: https://www.industrialpolitics-cdr.net/
Project Duration: March 2025 – Februar 2029
Funded by: Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

To limit global warming to 1.5° or 2°C, climate change mitigation scenarios indicate the need to deploy durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods at large scale – most prominently bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS). Yet while countries worldwide are developing political strategies to integrate such ‘novel’ CDR methods into climate policy, we know surprisingly little about how their rise is reconfiguring the politics of climate policy and green industrial policy.

The integration of CDR into climate policy may have far-reaching implications: it can create expectations of abundant future negative emissions, making decarbonization and fossil phase-out appear less urgent. Conceived as an option to balance residual ‘hard-to-abate’ emissions, the expanding role of CDR also raises key distributional questions: how residual emissions should be allocated across economic sectors and regions, what justifies hard-to-abateness, and which actors will be responsible for financing and scaling the necessary CDR capacity.

IPOL-CDR examines how expectations about CDR reconfigure actors’ perceptions of costs and benefits of climate change mitigation and the risk of asset stranding across economic sectors and industries. The project investigates how different industries and sectors envision using CDR to deal with residual emissions and achieve climate targets, and how these expectations shape their interests, strategies, and positioning in major political conflicts over the role of CDR in EU climate and industrial policy – for example the integration of CDR into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.

Drawing on qualitative document analysis, expert interviews, and participant observation, the project analyzes major EU policy debates and conflicts from 2022–2027 and traces how business actors – from heavy industry to agriculture, aviation, and oil and gas – seek to shape emerging CDR policy frameworks. It also explores how firms’ assets and business models relate to their fictional expectations about CDR and corresponding policy positions, and how financial regulators assess the role of CDR in climate-related asset revaluation.