Paper short abstract:

Given the dynamics of instrumentality, service, and complicity that have surrounded 'the engineer' in modernity, this paper excavates whether and how Australian carbon capture and storage (CCS) experts see, or do not see, pro-social values within their work to build futures for fossil energy.

Paper long abstract:

Energy and its effects on the climate have become dominant themes of the arrival to the 21st century and the recognition of deepening patterns of destruction and erosion in modernization's wake. Although contested, imaginative inheritances from modernity still shape what comes to count as the character of an "energy engineer" and visions of why such labor is knowledge-based, aspirational, and socially care-ful. Yet in "late industrialism" (Fortun 2012), changes in how energy has become an object of public intervention and concern have contributed to reshaping the prerequisites and opportunities for being an “energy expert" (Smith 2021). Given the dynamics of instrumentality (Heidegger, Ellul, Taylor), service (Veblen, Sennett, Smith), and complicity (Marcuse, Nobel, Ottinger, Subramanian) that have surrounded the characterization of an engineering expert from the mid 20th century to today, this paper digs into the question of whether and how Australian carbon capture and storage (CCS) experts see a pro-social vision in their endeavors to create next-generation fossil energy technology. Within contested forms of technology development that may be perceived as image-oriented or extractivist, what are the contours of the vision of service and responsibility that remains? How does the valorization of entrepreneural opportunism and technoscientific knowledge, now located in small, fragmented, and competing businesses rather than in state utilities and labs, coexist with contestation over whether and how new extractive infrastructures can serve pro-social ends?