A novel analysis of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology adoption: An evolutionary game model between stakeholders

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) plays a vital role in achieving carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission reduction for the power sector. It is meaningful to explore how to promote widespread adoption of CCS technology by power plants more smoothly. Distinguished from previous literature, this paper firstly established a government-enterprise evolutionary game framework to study issues of CCS adoption at the micro level. By expounding the conflict of interests on CCS adoption between governments and coal-fired power plants in China, an evolutionary game model was built to analyze the evolutionary stability and discuss the systematic dynamic evolutionary processes. Based on the simulation method, the theoretical consequences were verified, and the effects of critical parameters on the evolution trajectories were analyzed. This study found that: (i) for impelling the system to tend towards the optimal evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), it was essential to strengthen governmental supervision and improve the enthusiasm of power plants to adopt CCS technology. (ii) The initial willingness of stakeholders would affect the evolutionary trajectories. (iii) it was significant to increase governments’ political achievements and reduce its supervisory cost, improve policy support for power enterprises deploying CCS and its low-carbon power generation revenue, and decrease their CCS adoption cost.