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Paper short abstract

This paper connects EU’s low carbon hydrogen policy with local protest against local ‘green’ hydrogen production, ultimately pushing for imports that outsource land use conflicts. The ‘just transition’ is only possible with the socioecological fix of externalizing exploitation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the political economy of low-carbon hydrogen as a contested tool for a ‘just transition’, demonstrating how regulatory frameworks reproduce spatial power asymmetries.

While no longer considered as an energy panacea, hydrogen remains under research for specialised applications, and is slowly being used in production, with pipelines actively being repurposed and filled. The long-term strategy is to replace the high-emission (‘grey’) hydrogen with – in-part locally-produced – low-carbon (‘green’) hydrogen. The EU’s REDIII directive mandates that low-carbon hydrogen requires new installations for renewable energy (concept of additionality). Yet in Germany, even for projects benefitting local firms and where surplus electricity would lower local energy costs, necessary expansions are actively hindered in local parliaments by movements that have internalised anti-sustainability (anti-green, anti-solar, anti-wind) as part of their core political identity.

These groups construct identities around exaggerated critiques of sustainable energy, stifling nuanced debate over actual problems and polarising German society over wind and solar power. Instead, the proposed and appraised solution is hydrogen import, implying neo-extractivist plans to appropriate land at Europe’s peripheries and beyond for German industry. In these cases of Germany’s ecological transition, we can observe that socioecological fixes (Ekers/Prudham)—where social, ecological and often inherently capitalist problems are dealt with outsourcing land-use, and social and political conflicts—is applied here in two ways: by relocating energy production abroad, ecological risks are externalised, while associated socio-political conflicts are also avoided, reduced, or offshored. Thus, the ‘fix’ for low-carbon industries via hydrogen becomes entangled with international land exploitation.