Scaling a Moral Market and Entrepreneurial Narratives: The Emergence of Carbon Capture and Removal Technologies

The risks associated with anthropogenic climate change have prompted companies to invest in technologies that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. However, developing these products and markets presents challenges, such as points of contention arising from uncertainties about their effectiveness and their ability to scale quickly to prevent further global warming. To address these challenges, those involved in creating carbon-related markets seek support from policymakers and investors by crafting compelling narratives that moralize their technological solutions and engage in alliances with stakeholders to promote their emergence. In this paper, I examine carbon capture and removal technologies as a specific case of moral markets by using in-depth interviews with key industry informants, along with a collection of news articles about the carbon capture sector. Through thematic coding, I reveal how startups and stakeholders in this area perceive the challenges of using technologies and markets to turn carbon into a resource. The findings show that informants see carbon capture as a distinct, beneficial technology envisioned to operate like an oil company in reverse and to serve industries that would otherwise be challenging to decarbonize. This process of commodifying carbon and creating markets around it creates tensions regarding its capacity to reduce emissions at scale and the potential negative impacts of delaying the energy transition. Innovators in this field work with policy actors and investors to help reduce uncertainties. This, in turn, influences how they perceive the technology’s purpose and uncovers tensions between their vision and the wider institutional landscape. These findings are important for understanding how green technologies emerge, adding to our knowledge of the role of expectations in the social construction of markets and technology.