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Short abstract:

While green hydrogen is often presented as local, this paper aims to highlight the entanglements of green hydrogen in the french context of fast development.

Long abstract:

"Green" hydrogen is a strategic priority for the French government if it is to achieve its 2050 carbon neutrality targets. The objectives assigned to it today represent a bold promise: to decarbonize entire sectors of the economy then considered among the most difficult to green (aviation, steelworks, road haulage, etc.). But its development is often presented as an opportunity to relocalize energy production and to contribute to French energy sovereignty thanks new networks and industrial ecosystems. This talk will assess these promises while showing how this technoscientific promise (Joly, 2015) relies on networks of material flows (Quet 2022) that remain invisibilized and depoliticized. The first level of embedding is the complexity of the network of players involved in the projects. It involves energy suppliers and industrial consumers with very different cultures and practices. A second level involves the flow of materials between Global South and Global North countries, which is invisible in the presentation of the projects but still necessary. The analysis of these flows shows large discrepencies in the manners of thinking and designing the durability of hydrogen projects in France.

This talk relies on a study of strategic documents and on two recents and very different case studies : Saint-Brieuc and Saint-Nazaire.