Image credit: Energy Ethics Centre
Abstract
The acknowledgement of human induced climate change has started to undo carbon cultures. While the useof coal, oil, and gas is still on the rise globally, first former centres of energy extraction are reimagining and reorganizing their future. This article presents how this process of transition is taking place in Aberdeen, the self-declared energy capital of Europe. Since 2013 and with the beginning acknowledgement of the immanent end of hydrocarbons as main source of energy, Aberdeen City Council has cooperated with the local oil and gas industry and an EU-wide network of partners to develop strategies and infrastructure projects for a local hydrogen economy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I argue that this approach to the technological reinvention of the city is contingent on the infrastructural and organizational legacies of the carbon era and misses realizing the full potential that hydrogen offers to the larger Aberdeen City Region. These carbon continuities and their entailing perpetuation of established networks of power are analysed with a focus on plans to turn parts of the historically marginalised Torry neighbourhood into an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ). Designed to establish the city as a global centre of excellence for hydrogen, decentralized and community owned forms of hydrogen production are as much erased from Aberdeen’s future as the citizens’ demand for participation in the making of this future. Exploring these foreclosed possibilities, the article concludes by spelling out some of the virtual hydrogen worlds that could materialize as alternative futures.
Johannes Hollenhorst
Doctoral Researcher of Sociology
I am researching the climate society at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and economic sociology. Particularly, I am interested in the way hydrogen is turned into a central material for decarbonising industrial processes around the world. This transformational process is raising questions about justice, democracy, and the relationship of nature and culture.