Putting the U in carbon capture and storage: rhetorical boundary negotiation within the CCS/CCUS scientific community

ABSTRACT

This paper examines responses to a framing shift from carbon capture and storage (CCS) to carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) within science and engineering professionals’ communication. We argue that the framing shift is a breach in the rhetorical boundaries of the CCS professional community that calls forth negotiation through responses that proactively support, resist, or acquiesce. This study offers a heuristic for examining scientific framing in expert-to-expert internal scientific rhetoric. It also contributes to contemporary research on the intersection of rhetoric of science and science, technology, and society; the social dimensions of CCS; energy communication; and applied communicative practices in scientific communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change communication
• energy policy
• rhetorical field methods
• science communication

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Clean coal’ suggests that CCS can make coal clean(er) by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Although the term is not considered problematic within the CCS community, neither is it universally accepted. Many scientists and engineers consider it a problematic oxymoron (for more on clean coal see: Schneider, Schwarze, Bsumek, & Peeples, 2016).

2. Hereafter, we use CCS/CCUS to describe the professional scientific community and technologies, reflecting the framing shift’s blurring of boundaries. However, we use CCS and CCUS separately when comparing them as distinct frames or when used by our informants and secondary sources.

3. There are many ways in which captured CO₂ can be utilized in food, oil and gas, and chemical industries such as food chilling, carbonated beverages, enhanced hydrocarbon (oil or natural gas) recovery, and as raw material for a variety of chemical materials.

4. EOR, also known as tertiary recovery, is a process for oil extraction that generally follows primary recovery (using natural reservoir pressure to extract the oil) and secondary recovery (injecting water or gas to displace the oil in the reservoir). The CO₂-EOR process was first used at commercial scales in West Texas in the early 1970s, using CO₂ from naturally occurring reservoirs. Today, its applications are being expanded for a broader suite of oil reservoirs located near anthropogenic CO₂ sources.

5. Although Turner focuses on rituals as an important symbolic response to social drama, Gross and other communication scholars have shown that rhetorical performances are also used to negotiate social drama (Berg, 1995; Farrell, 1989; Fuoss, 1995).

6. Institutional Review Boards at the University of Utah and Texas A&M University approved our study.

7. Personal Communication, Brenda Bowen (September 17, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation, Division of Social and Economic Sciences, Technology, and Society [grant numbers 1329563; 1550227; 1127600]; U.S. Department of Energy [grant number DE-FE-0001731]; College of Humanities, University of Utah.