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Short abstract:

Electrolytic politics analyses the deployment of green hydrogen infrastructures and vehicles in the center of the UK oil and gas industry, Aberdeen. Despite its firm original orientation to a renewable future, the paper points out how engrained hydrogen remains in the city's hydrocarbon past.

Long abstract:

Electrolytic politics emerged in Aberdeen due to the political will to bring green hydrogen technology to a city that remains until today deeply engrained in the UK oil and gas industry. Crucially, the politics of Aberdeen City Council were thereby not yet driven by the considerations of net zero or the economics of green growth which became the driving force for hydrogen infrastructure deployment from 2019 onwards. Rather, the Council was trying to make a difference to the unfolding of Aberdeen's energy future in a highly pragmatic and at the same time in a highly experimental way to position the city as an energy city beyond oil and gas. At the time the council started to invest time and resources into winning funding from the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU) for the first hydrogen projects in the early 2010s, it was still highly uncertain whether hydrogen would ever become acknowledged as a crucial energy technology. And yet, its actions created a speculative discoursive, and material basis that would allow local companies to eventually build on, once oil and gas extraction would no longer support the livelihoods of the tens of thousands of people who were still employed by the industry at the time. Positioning itself strategically side-by-side with the oil and gas industry's interest in blue rather than electrolytic, green hydrogen, it however also facilitated the exploitation of the local hydrogen story and practical experience by players largely interested in extending the hydrocarbon past into the future.