Shoreline demos: The contested place of the public in a marine carbon removal trial

This paper analyses controversy over a marine carbon removal trial in St Ives Bay, UK, and how place-based demonstrations contested the proposed experiment and the affected public. Based on ethnographic research with communities mobilised by local protests, we examine how the proposed ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) “test” was recast as an intervention that would directly affect the Bay's communities. We describe how protests brought into being a local network that produced evidence of potential harms, lobbied for regulatory intervention and proposed counter-experiments. Our analysis shows how, using place-specific practices of demonstration, the groups at the centre of this network disputed claims that the Bay was an “ideal” field site for testing OAE technology. We detail how the experiment design enacted a liquid public that could be flexibly invoked and projected as the aggregate beneficiary of future technology deployment. Juxtaposed with stakeholders connecting science and markets, the Bay's communities could be fixed in onshore space and framed as a threat to a promising climate solution. We show how practices of “shoreline demonstration” used by the Bay's communities made visible nearshore-onshore entanglements and potential impacts not accounted for in the experiment design, connecting together concerns about regulatory decision-making, coastal economies, protected ecosystems and geochemical uncertainties. We argue that contestation over the scale and impact of the OAE test rested on competing constructions of the Bay and its place in everyday community life. In concluding, we discuss what this controversy signals about the emerging innovation regime around which carbon removal projects and trials are proliferating.