What drives local public acceptance–Comparing two cases from Germany

Local projects on carbon storage that have been started in Germany in recent years have induced positive to neutral reactions as well as strong opposition by the local public. In this paper, a comparative case study of two storage projects is presented: The first case under study is the CO2 Sink research project at Ketzin which has started to inject CO2 in 2008 and has been well accepted by local politicians and the local public. It is compared to a project initiated by Vattenfall at Beeskow where Vattenfall wants to explore whether the region is suitable for large scale commercial on shore storage and has met strong local opposition by several societal stakeholders. Cases are compared regarding project properties, communication strategies and public perception, as well as local context and history in order to identify factors that contributed to the respective positive or negative reaction.