Where Science Meets Resistance: Transforming Geoscientists into Effective Communicators

Abstract Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) faces challenges when proponents are communicating difficult concepts and science to members of the general public, to the media, or to government officials. Turning scientific concepts into public acceptance and license to operate is particularly challenging for CCS, when doubts about climate change, conspiracy theories, and combative political discourse overpower science and project planning. Effective communications planning can anticipate and counteract these forces leading to successful project implementation. The Aquistore CO2 Deep Saline Storage Project, in southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada, has developed effective communications and outreach strategies that have become important bellwethers for other projects thinking of moving forward with CCS. The project developed both a local public outreach strategy, along with print and video materials that have been successful in soliciting broad public support for the project over the past 15 years. But as social media has developed over the life of the project, addressing new challenges arising from dis- and misinformation has proven more difficult and has required more vigilance and methods of counteracting such sources. Aquistore has provided the opportunity to develop, over time, new methods of information and project dissemination that have been useful learning tools for the geoscientists and engineers involved in the project to better communicate the importance of CCS to audiences that are becoming more and more fractured and influenced by disparate and misleading media sources. This has meant proponents have had to increase the project’s social media presence, along with attending more events and conferences outside of science and geophysics to spread accurate information. The project has also seen its staff and scientists become more vigilant in observing the ways artificial intelligence is being trained to speak of CCS in both negative and positive ways. AI’s relationship to CCS has, in some ways, become a battleground for competing and often opposing political views about climate change, making it even more important for CCS scientists to develop ways of explaining CCS that are clear to broader audiences. Aquistore has developed effective outreach and communications strategies that have developed in innovative ways over the project’s 15 years that address areas like AI and disinformation that have rarely been faced by such projects in the past, and which have required geoscience professionals to learn new ways of providing facts and information.