Conor Hickey is an Assistant Professor in Energy and Climate at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Cambridge, he was a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School and held research fellowships at the University of Oxford, including as an Oxford Net Zero Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College.

His research investigates the economic risks governments and companies face as they phase out fossil fuels — particularly risks to infrastructure investment. He also looks at how these risks are distributed across the economy in response to policies that aim to, or fail to, reduce both the production and consumption of fossil fuels at the same time. He mainly uses economic and computational modelling to study these issues.

More recently, Conor has been examining the economic and climate-related risks of relying on carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage to prolong the use of fossil fuels as part of net zero strategies — including what this means for achieving temperature stabilisation goals and the potential risks it poses to infrastructure investment.

MSt Climate, Environmental and Urban Policy

CEUP 2 Economics and Public Policy of Sustainability

CEUP 4 Climate Change and the Energy Transformation

CEUP7 Methods and Methodologies

1. Economics of Enhanced Methane Oxidation Relative to Carbon Dioxide Removal

   C Hickey & M Allen 

   Environmental Research Letters, 19 6 4043(2024)

2. A Review of Commercialisation Mechanisms for Carbon Dioxide Removal

   C Hickey, S Fankhauser, S Smith, M Allen

   Frontiers in Climate 4, 258 (2023)

3. Global Database of Cement Production Assets and Upstream Suppliers

   N Tkachenko, B Caldecott, M McCarten …, C Hickey et al.

   Scientific Data 10, 1 696 (2023)

4. Stranded Assets: environmental drivers, societal challenges, and supervisory responses

   B Caldecott, A Clark, K Koskelo, E Mulholland, C Hickey

   Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46, 417-447 (2021)

5. Can European Electric Utilities Manage Asset Impairments Arising from Net Zero Targets? 

   C Hickey, J O'Brien, B Caldecott, C McInerney, B Ó Gallachóir

   Journal of Corporate Finance 70, 102075 (2021)

6. The Variation in Capacity Remuneration Requirements in European Electricity Markets 

   C Hickey, D Bunn, P Deane, C McInerney, B Ó Gallachóir

   The Energy Journal 42 (2) (2020)

7. Is There a Future for the Gas Network in a Low Carbon Energy System?

   C Hickey, P Deane, C McInerney, B Ó Gallachóir

   Energy Policy 126 (2019)

8. Quantifying stranding risk for fossil fuel assets and implications for renewable energy investment: A review of the literature

   J Curtin, C McInerney, BÓ Gallachóir, C Hickey, P Deane, P Deeney 

   Renewable and Sustainable Strategy Reviews 116 (2019)