The Race to Negative Emissions Technologies and the Centrality of Fossil Fuel Companies

Capturing carbon is increasingly critical to keeping the Paris Agreement within reach. However, developing and scaling solutions that permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere represents a major technological and societal challenge. In this context, the role of incumbents in shaping the trajectory of emerging technologies remains unclear and often ambiguous. Adopting a competence-based perspective centered on technological coherence, this article examines the role of fossil fuel companies in the evolving carbon sequestration industry, contrasting carbon capture and storage—a technology that captures CO2 from emission sources—with direct air capture (DAC), a novel approach that directly removes carbon from ambient air. Using International Energy Agency data on carbon capture projects combined with corporate, financial, and patent records, we reconstruct and analyze the global network of organizations active in the sector. Results show that fossil fuel companies are central players in the global carbon capture landscape, leveraging established assets and expertise, but are largely disconnected from emerging DAC projects. This supports the view that DAC is a competence-destroying innovation for the fossil fuel industry, involving substantial process and product discontinuities, as further confirmed by patent analysis, which reports a substantial distance between incumbents’ and DAC-related technical knowledge. In contexts characterized by high entry barriers, technological coherence—beyond complementary assets and societal value—appears crucial for assessing how incumbents engage with technologies addressing grand challenges. Jointly monitoring collaboration networks and innovation activities within incumbent industries is therefore essential for understanding how new technologies may (or may not) contribute to sustainability transitions.