Hey Finders!
Our article “The Race to Negative Emissions Technologies and the Centrality of Fossil Fuel Companies” (Francesco Lamperti, Giorgio Tripodi, Linda Sabattini, Martina Iori) is now available in Business & Society. In the paper, we look at how fossil fuel companies are positioned in the emerging field of negative emissions technologies 🌍
We focus on two key technologies:
🔹 Point-source carbon capture (CCS)
🔹 Direct air capture (DAC)
Using project, corporate, financial, and patent data, we map the global network of actors involved in carbon capture. A few key takeaways:
✅ Fossil fuel companies are extremely central in the carbon capture landscape
✅ Their role is especially strong in technologies close to their existing assets and capabilities — namely, point-source carbon capture
✅ They appear much less connected to direct air capture technologies
✅ We measure the technological distance between DAC and fossil fuel companies’ patent portfolios, revealing a sizable gap
✅ This suggests that capturing CO₂ from the ambient air is a different game: DAC may be technologically disruptive for fossil fuel incumbents, which might enter the sector through direct acquisition of DAC companies rather than internal development
✅ This may raise issues for the sustainability of the DACS sector’s future
👉 The broader question we ask is: When can incumbent firms help scale climate technologies, and when do their existing capabilities become a constraint?
Read the paper here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00076503261447805