CCUS Futures seeks to use the collective knowledge of industry-based workers to identify practical, sociocultural and economic challenges and opportunities in place- and sector-specific decarbonisation. By first thinking about past changes to local lives and landscapes, we will engage people employed in organisations in the Scottish Cluster in a process of imagining how implementing Carbon Capture (Utilisation) and Storage in their own industries might change lives and landscape in the future – that is, their “CCUS imaginaries”. As well as revealing aspirations and fears, this process will also help to bring to light expectations and misconceptions that may need to be addressed before a social licence will be possible.

Our principal aim is to develop and trial ways of effectively leveraging workforce knowledge and understanding to identify and pre-empt decarbonisation challenges. Our objectives are to:

1. explore and develop use of place-based, participatory, speculative fiction (PBPSF) (Wilson 2024; Wilson et al. 2023b) to articulate and synthesis workforce “CCUS imaginaries”;
2. use these imaginaries to identify aspirations, concerns, expectations and misconceptions;
3. show how these can be used to improve organisational learning to identify and pre-empt consequent pinch points and stressors that might disrupt decarbonisation.

Our innovation is the use of PBPSF to connect local knowledges of past and present with future visions.