If we are going to talk about carbon capture, utilization and storage … Or, rather – when we are going to talk about CCUS –
What do we say?
Rachel Lim, assistant professor of media and strategic communications at Oklahoma State University, will present “How Do We Initiate CCUS Dialogue With Stakeholders? Navigating Communication in a Complex Sociopolitical Landscape,” on March 30 at the CCUS 2026 event in The Woodlands, Texas.
Her results come from a current study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy for the Anadarko Basin Carbon Management Hub, led by OSU and the University of Oklahoma.
The study assesses the influence of political affiliation and ideology on audience response to CCUS communications, examines source effects on message receptivity and tests whether CCUS message effectiveness varies by proximity to CCUS sites.
“We realized that there were some challenges with starting a conversation about CCUS, or communicating information about CCUS,” Lim said.
“We kind of wanted to see if these challenges could be addressed in our project,” she added.
State Map of Oklahoma with: (A) Faults and > 3 Mw epicenters color and sized coded by year range and by magnitude (USGS)
(B) Major cities, freeways, and reported emissions for 2019 color coded by source type and size coded by CO2 equivalent volume (source: OGS). Also shown in blue are current CO2 pipelines. The solid black polygon is the study area in (A) and (B).
The NIMBY Effect
Lim was still analyzing results at the time of this writing. But to the question of whether proximity matters to message effectiveness, the answer was definitely “Yes.” And that was true for both physical proximity and psychological proximity – how close and relevant the subject felt to respondents.
“When we started talking about CCUS happening in other countries, or as a technology, I could see that people didn’t really click about what CCUS is,” Lim said.
“When people perceived CCUS as happening close to where they lived, like near their community, they were more engaged with messages explaining why CCUS matters,” she noted.
“Our findings show that psychological distance matters in how to communicate CCUS technology to key stakeholders,” she said.
Also, she noted a lower response to messaging built around the technical details of how CCUS happens.
Instead, “people wanted to know why this is happening,” Lim said.
“There’s also, ‘Is this likely to be happening? Or, ‘How soon is this happening?,’” she said.
Keeping it Simple
In general, Lim noted, following the basic rules of good communication, using the KISS Rule to keep things simple and avoiding politics works best in discussing CCUS, whatever the audience.
“Best practices come from understanding the audience and the community. In the long run, it’s built on establishing relationships and trust,” she said.
“Two-way conversation is also another key,” she added.
While experts often want to show off their expertise, stakeholders mostly want a concise and clear explanation of the subject matter and some sense of why it’s relevant to them.
“Make it as simple as possible. Many times people get too excited about talking about the technical stuff,” Lim said.
“It’s important to say it in plain language, maybe even in a way that an elementary level can understand,” she noted.
Carbon capture and storage comes with a significant amount of political baggage. Lim said in this case, it’s better to leave the baggage at home. Discussions of controversy around CCUS don’t tend to be helpful.
“Also, stay away from politics. Really be careful not to position it (CCUS) as a political framing. Even the impression of that should be avoided. We should lead by identifying shared community priorities and staying open to feedback,” Lim observed.
“It’s important to explain the technology in a way that a lay audience can understand, while being careful to steer clear of political framing so the project isn’t perceived through a partisan lens,” she said.
Building Bridges
The DOE study concentrates on the Anadarko Basin area in Oklahoma. Lim said her group has engaged with multiple stakeholders, with audiences including the general population, local governments and businesses.
“The Oklahoma Native American tribal community is an important key stakeholder in our project. We try to include diverse stakeholders in talking to our communities in Oklahoma,” she said.
Understanding the different backgrounds and beliefs of different audiences turns out to be important in shaping communications about CCUS, Lim observed, especially the audiences’ environmental perceptions.
“People approach the idea of climate change in different ways. We’ve found it does affect the way people perceive CCUS,” she said.
The stated aim of the Carbon Management Hub is to “support the U.S. Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) goal of identifying and addressing the challenges facing regional commercial deployment” of CCUS.
“Our study is an integral part of this project’s stakeholder engagement efforts, involving multiple phases of mixed-methods research, both qualitative and quantitative,” Lim said.
“Building upon our initial engagement, we launched a survey in late 2025 in collaboration with Rosemary Avance, Andy Peprah and Medeline Mascari” at OSU, she said.
As of February, the study was ongoing. “We have a couple of surveys that we have out. We’re still running them and analyzing them,” she said.
Among the preliminary findings, the importance of proximity in communicating about CCUS is one concept that stood out.
“When we started talking about CCUS happening in other countries, people did not feel the technology was personally relevant, or (that it was too) abstract,” Lim noted.
With proximity established, they were “more engaged with messages describing how CCUS works and how effective it could be in achieving environmental goals and delivering benefits,” she said.
The communication study’s stated objective is to examine how sociopolitical factors shape the reception of CCUS messages and to identify best practices for engaging stakeholders.
“The larger goal that we have in applying the findings is, hopefully, that the communication could help build that bridge for people to make informed decisions and engage in conversations about technologies that affect their communities,” Lim said.