Abstract
In 2020, the Norwegian government declared its intent to fund and facilitate the massive Longship project; a first of its kind carbon capture and storage (CCS) project to establish a full-scale value chain and open-source market for the capture, transport, and permanent storage of carbon from hard-to-abate process industries across Northern Europe. The history of CCS is one of big expectations, decades of failed projects, and environmental contestations, yet it maintains its status as an important component in official net zero schemes. Past attempts at deploying CCS follow a plotline familiar in sustainability transitions: start small, strengthen, grow big, and break through once enough momentum has been reached. Such a pathway is the archetypal plotline for a reason, it reduces risks and uncertainties during emergent processes of embedding. However, CCS has a chicken-and-egg challenge, where deployment of experiments and pilot projects will not take off in the absence of CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure. In response, Longship is a departure from the familiar plotline. This thesis examines this strategy employed by the Norwegian state; that it represents something novel for our understandings of accelerated diffusion and socio-technical embedding, and more specifically, embedding of technologies characterized by large size, high complexity, and a high customization requirement (i.e. “lumpy” technologies). The thesis is based on three articles and a cross-cutting essay. The first article draws attention to the role that material dimensions, or technology characteristics, play in societal embedding of lumpy technologies. This reveals a dynamic process of co-construction between technology developers and the technology characteristics of CO₂ capture units. The second article analyzes the overarching Longship strategy managed by the Norwegian state, finding that it points to a new type of socio-technical niche, an enabling niche. This type of niche is implemented to facilitate experimentation and development of technologies, like CCS, which require the existence of extensive infrastructure for projects to be deployed. The third article assesses the open-source, market-making strategy foregrounding Longship aimed at commercializing the transport and storage of CO₂, thus requalifying CO₂ from industrial waste to a tradable product and building a market based on an externality. Synthesizing across these articles, the cross-cutting analysis examines the Norwegian embedding strategy for this lumpy technology. I approach the Longship project as a lumpy socio-technical configuration, co-constituted by its creators and unique materiality towards enacting a specific socio-technical outcome; the widespread practice of capturing CO₂ emissions from process industrial activities. Furthermore, I situate this analysis at a theoretical crossover between sustainability transitions research, science and technology studies, and innovation studies. Through the cross-cutting analysis, I employ an interdisciplinary approach by mobilizing analytical complementarities across the articles towards constructivist-based conclusions. Findings show how Longship project facilitators are actively configuring the socio-technical dimensions of CCS to enact new socio-technical outcomes in an attempt to champion a difficult history. Findings further show that processes of embedding for this CCS configuration involves much heterogeneity and thus must include a dynamic strategy for support and accommodation of this heterogeneity. Results also show that a niche need not necessarily exist in relation to a socio-technical regime. These interdisciplinary insights derive a few implications for doing socio-technical research on sustainability transitions. First, I suggest that transitions scholars may benefit from mobilizing constructivist analytical complementarities to core transitions studies frameworks towards generating novel insights. Second, I suggest that STS scholars can activate categorical analytical complementarities to generate deeper insights into how the social and the technical are co-constituted. I conclude by showing Longship as a case of enacting an entirely new system and how serious socio-technical analysis can help researchers address current sustainability transitions challenges which tend to be characterized by heightened complexity, contestations, tensions, and value-laden phenomena.