skelton@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Florian Skelton is a PhD student in economic geography at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He holds an MA in Political Theory from the University of Frankfurt and the Technical University of Darmstadt, as well as a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Zurich. He is interested in environmental politics, energy humanities, science and technology studies, and the history of political ideas. He has also worked on democracy studies and on urban policies as a student research assistant, and spent a semester at the New School for Social Research. Before joining the RTG ‘Fixing Futures’, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Zurich’s Chair for the History of the Anthropocene and a trainee at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.
Project Description
European climate policy calls for the creation of a carbon management market that sequesters hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ in the next few decades. This requires both carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). While no infrastructure exists that could capture, move and store CO₂ at this scale yet, different actors are building technologies, organisations, and commercial strategies as this market emerges.
To gain a bottom-up perspective on these developments, I visit carbon management projects and industry conferences across Central and Northern Europe, conducting ethnographic observations and interviews. These projects range from small-scale operations to large joint ventures, and from non-profit initiatives to commercial enterprises. While this market-in-the-making does not yet operate through the stable, repeated transactions that normally characterise markets, actors are starting to enact a ‘carbon value chain’ by positioning themselves as transport or storage providers, as technology developers, intermediaries, investors, or clients.
Adopting a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, I examine how these actors develop various devices to present carbon management as feasible and profitable, and ask how these devices are shaped by the material properties of CO₂. For example, I study how entrepreneurs mobilise concepts such as ‘business models’ and ‘scalability’ to attract investments. In this way, my project contributes to a better understanding of marketization, showing how policy ambitions, investor expectations and the material properties of CO₂ shape an emerging market.