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- Convenors:
-
Alison Lesdos
(Université Grenoble Alpes)
Hugo Vosila (Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Michael Kriechbaum (Graz University of Technology)
Filip Rozborski (Maastricht University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the tensions between upscaling visions and alternative, localized pathways in the ‘green gas’ sector (e.g., hydrogen, biomethane). It invites contributions on infrastructure, knowledge, and territorial energy justice, questioning visions for expanding ‘green gas’ development.
Description
‘Green gases’—hydrogen, anaerobic digestion, and emerging sectors— have become a crucial component of numerous energy transition strategies, where their expansion is often justified by cost-efficiency and connectivity. From the REPowerEU Plan to national roadmaps, policy frameworks present large-scale infrastructures and production sites as unavoidable steps towards decarbonizing energy systems. Yet, these visions frequently replicate fossil fuel logics, marginalize alternative knowledge systems, and reinforce territorial inequalities.
This panel invites contributions that critically examine the politics of scale in ‘green gas’ transitions. Drawing on STS literature on sociotechnical futures (Konrad et al. 2017), scalability (Tsing, 2012), co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), and infrastructural dependencies (Star, 1999), we seek to explore the plurality of transition pathways, between traditional economies of scale, scalar biases (Sareen, 2021) or processes of “deep scaling” (Laurent & Violle, 2025). It emphasizes how various actors envision, contest, enact, and materialize the futures of ‘green gases’ at multiple scales.
We welcome contributions that trace these dynamics across different domains, including policy, technological innovation, media, and broader societal discourses, addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:
• Knowledge and expertise: How do dominant epistemic communities shape ‘green gas’ futures? What forms of knowledge are excluded or rendered invisible?
• Materialities and infrastructures: What alternative configurations challenge the fossil-based ‘green gas’ infrastructures? How do material dependencies constrain or enable different futures?
• Territorialization and justice: How do ‘green gas’ infrastructures reconfigure space and reproduce inequalities? Which territories are prioritized or marginalized, and what forms of resistance emerge?
• Visions and imaginaries: How do upscaling visions relate to sociotechnical imaginaries? What alternative visions are being articulated?
By intersecting perspectives on different ‘green gases’ across national, regional, and local scales, this panel aims to foster dialogue on the contested futures of ‘green gases’ in transitions and the role of STS in imagining defossilized, just, and plural energy transitions.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Hydrogen and lithium socio-technical imaginaries co-produce regional space in Northwest Bohemia, Czech Republic. We use the concept of Re-infrastructuring to show how industrial/coal legacies shift from burden to asset, exposing place-based transition as contested and uneven.
Paper long abstract
This paper is a case study of negotiating the EU's just energy transition in the regional context. It examines discourses surrounding the proposed hydrogen economy and lithium mining projects in Northwest Bohemia (Czech Republic), a coal- and industry-dependent region currently targeted by EU transition funding/decarbonisation. The paper advances the claim that decarbonisation is characterised by an inevitable intersection between socio-technical futures and socio-spatial transformations: socio-technical imaginaries (of "hydrogen economies" or "critical minerals mining") actively reconfigure spatial imaginaries of regions, while spatial imaginaries (of peripheries, corridors, hubs, or "affected territories") reciprocally shape what these technologies can plausibly mean and how they are justified. To render this mutual dependence empirically visible, we introduce re-infrastructuring as an analytical concept. Re-infrastructuring condenses the relationship between socio-technical and spatial imaginaries and allows us to trace it across both material registers (inherited infrastructures, sites, labour, landscapes) and immaterial/institutional registers (funding instruments, governance arrangements, expertise, know-how, and discursive repertoires). Our central argument is that regional transition politics is organised around attempts to re-infrastructuralise institutional–socio-material inheritance to reassemble what regions already "have" so that inherited burdens become narrated and governed as assets and future value; disconnection becomes connectivity; and historical grievances are translated into continuity and strategic regional positioning (e.g., from an extractive "energy reservoir" to an "energy heartland" and "laboratory"). The paper thereby reframes place-based transition not as a neutral policy principle, but as a contested process of regional revaluation with distributive consequences.
Paper short abstract
This paper compares strategies about anaerobic digestion deployment in Île-de-France. Whereas crossing scaling-up strategies accelerate AD spread at the risk of strengthen usual energy and agriculture regimes, deep-scaling strategies take more time but could allocate better costs and benefits.
Paper long abstract
This paper analyses the sociotechnical implications of different scalarity strategies (Laurent et Violle 2025) in the case of anaerobic digestion (AD) deployment in Seine-et-Marne (Île-de-France), region known as pioneer in France for introducing both intermediate energy crop and biomethane injection.
The data corpus, collected between 2017 and 2024, includes press articles, grey literature, around thirty interviews and the observation of several professional events.
First, emergence (around 2012) and spreading of intermediate energy crop biomethane and injection in Seine-et-Marne can be understood crossing several “scaling up strategies” developed by different stakeholders acting at different levels: renewable energy production objectives defined by community and national policies, greening gas supply at networks level, diversifying agriculture activities at sector and establishments levels, securing risk for public and private funding bodies.
Second, we point out that “deep scaling strategies” less impact AD deployment whereas they are public or private. Local planning doesn’t constraint project promoters. Projects dedicated to assemble diverse inputs take more time to coordinate and are fewer.
Finally, we discuss the sociopolitical implications of these two contrasted models. Whereas scaling up strategies tend to extend faster AD, it risks to strengthen energy and agricultural regime. Despite great financial and time resources needed, among alternative models, territorial approach could represent an opportunity to include a wider diversity of stakeholders, allocate costs and benefices more equitably and integrate additional concerns.
To conclude, sizing notion should be extended beyond production objectives, return on investment and units scale considering also costs and benefices allocation at several levels.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the everyday futurities produced around Hyrasia One, focusing on the 10 largest green hydrogen projects. It follows socio-material and spatial transformations and shows how different views of the international projects dwell on the land and water and interact with one another.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores one of the 10 largest projects of green hydrogen production in the world–Hyrasia One, located in the Mangystau region in Kazakhstan. As planned, the project will produce two million tons of green hydrogen by 2032, which will supply Europe as well. The project involves building an electrolysis plant with desalination technology to source water from the Caspian Sea. Focusing on a specific technology, the production of green hydrogen, and socio-materialities that shape it, the paper examines the future through the lens of everyday futurities (De Coss-Corzo 2025) and questions how multiple actors participate in producing the future through, around, and with green hydrogen. In this sense, the future is embedded in the present and connected to the everyday, as it does not stop at plans and schemes but is produced through concrete bureaucratic, political, and material actions.
Looking at the ongoing changes initiated by the Hyrasia One in the Mangystau region, this paper speaks to the studies of water and land as a system of relationships (e.g., Calarco 2024), and pays particular attention to the more-than-human relations that shape it (Rusca et al. 2025). In this context, land is a system of relations involving dwelling on it, exploiting it, caring for it, and imagining its future. Exploring the situatedness of an international project and stressing its nature 'in-the-making', this paper shows how different views on land and water futures intersect and clash with each other. Future, then, becomes transformed but not pre-defined by the green hydrogen.
Paper short abstract
This study examines the political economy of CNG in India’s transport sector, tracing how policy, politics, and technology feedbacks institutionally embedded CNG in India's transport sector's green transition.
Paper long abstract
India is one of the very few countries in the world with a sizeable Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicle fleet. The CNG fleet is expected to grow in the near- to middle-term future, producing complexities and challenges to India’s transport sector’s green transition amidst a global transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Further, the government of India recently began pushing for Compressed Biogas (CBG), greener version of CNG, and adopted policy that mandates CBG blending with CNG. CBG has allowed the government to frame natural gas vehicles as green alternatives to petrol/diesel vehicles, align natural gas expansion with broader sustainable energy transition, and justify investments in expanding gas infrastructure in India.
This study takes a historical-dynamics perspective. It looks at the origin of the CNG technology in India in early 2000’s and examines the feedbacks between policy, politics, and technology that ensued to make CNG a dominant technology for the transportation sector. It analyses the political and economic interests underpinning recent CBG blending mandates and the expansion of gas distribution networks. By situating CNG within competing low-carbon pathways, particularly electrification, the paper interrogates whether natural gas represents a transitional bridge or a path-dependent lock-in.
Paper short abstract
Green hydrogen is seen as key to global decarbonization, yet global progress lags behind expectations. Chile, early adopted its strategy and announced 83 projects so far, appears as frontrunner, but remains at the planning stage. The paper analyzes three competing sociotechnical imaginaries.
Paper long abstract
In the early 2020s, green hydrogen emerged as one of the most promising solutions for global decarbonization. The EU’s aspirations to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 consider green hydrogen as key element to decarbonize carbon-intensive industries. Internationally, however, implementation has progressed more slowly than anticipated, and growth has fallen short of the high expectations raised at the beginning of the decade.
Chile entered the global green hydrogen debate at an early stage and became the first South American country to adopt a national green hydrogen strategy in 2020. Since then, 83 projects have been officially announced, positioning Chile among the frontrunners, at least on paper. Yet, green hydrogen is frequently described in media and scientific reports as an “apuesta” (bet), suggesting it to become more of a gamble than a strategic driver for economic development. Across the literature, there is broad agreement that green hydrogen remains a technology limited to plans rather than concrete realisation.
Taking this as a starting point, this paper analyzes the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2015) surrounding green hydrogen in Chile. Based on expert interviews conducted in Chile in March/April 2026 as well as document and newspaper analysis, the findings reveal three competing imaginaries: a future optimistic market and technology leadership imaginary, an energy transition imaginary that overlooks social-ecological impacts and a social-ecological transformation imaginary that emphasizes sustainability and justice.
By exploring these imaginaries, the paper shows the diverging and contesting visions that take place at the same time and shape Chile’s green hydrogen future.
Paper short abstract
This paper introduces charged water as a concept to highlight how hydrogen’s materiality is charged with politics, emotions and conflicts. A case study of Eastern Germany shows how local resistance to hydrogen projects–despite economic benefits–leads to outsourcing conflicts and to neo-extractivism.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the contested visions around hydrogen as a "green gas" in Europe’s energy transition. Though the production of hydrogen is not literally ‘charging water’ - it is produced via electrolysis - it is not just a technical process. Rather, in the process, water is not only “charged” with energy, but also with questions of finance, politics, emotions and protests, and with legal frameworks that shape its role in decarbonization and one that reconfigures water, energy, and territory – hence the concept “charged water”. Drawing on the notions of "multiple waters" of Barnes and Alatout(2012), of “nonscalability” of Tsing(2012), the scalar biases of Sareen and Haarstad(2021), and through a case study of eastern Germany, the paper examines how local industries face political blockades against the construction of hydrogen facilities, despite the potential for local jobs and cheaper renewable electricity. Meanwhile, EU policy pivots towards importing hydrogen from regions which are water scarce (e.g., North Africa) or where the land ownership is contested (e.g. Finland), outsourcing such land-use conflicts to regions with a higher power imbalance. This dynamic illustrates the capitalist vision a socioecological fix(Ekers&Prudham 2017) where nonscalability within Germany is externalized, smoothly combining with a scalar bias(Sareen&Haarstad 2021) that favors global supply chains over local energy production.
By tracing these tensions between local production and import-dependent visions, the paper reveals how hydrogen’s ‘green’ promise is entangled with neo-extractivist logics, and is also calling for a just transition that acknowledges the political charges embedded in the hydrogen’s assemblage.
Paper short abstract
Drawing from multiple visits to World Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, I explore how future cities, based on hydrogen technologies, are envisioned and materialised. In two pavilions, hydrogen technologies are portrayed as necessary for a smart, sustainable society, with prototypes of different scales.
Paper long abstract
Energy transition relying on green hydrogen is at a pivotal crossroad, with its viability constantly questioned and compared with that of battery technologies, particularly in the mobility sector. Green hydrogen is said to hinge on an inefficient and energy-intensive processes – hence its promises necessitate an unprecedented scale-up of existing hydrogen-producing infrastructures. Large-scale initiatives such as the EU’s hydrogen valleys is indeed one such attempt, but their actualisation is away from the view of the public, and their futures beyond their status as ‘proofs of concept’ are opaque. Green hydrogen thus is kept at the margins of future energy transition despite existing strategies and policies, taken as a complement to the larger green infrastructures. Turning away from the EU for a contrast, Japan has put hydrogen infrastructures front and centre in their ambition for the future fossil-free society. Drawing from multiple visits to World Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, I explore how future cities, based on hydrogen technologies, are envisioned and materialised. The study focuses on two pavilions: the Iida Group x Osaka Metropolitan University pavilion, and the Future City pavilion. Both pavilions portray hydrogen technologies as necessary for a smart, sustainable society, with prototypes ranging from personal mobility to large-scale energy infrastructures. Despite these complementary elements, the two pavilions enact hydrogen futures differently, illustrating how materialisations stabilise futures in distinctive ways. The key to stabilisation lies in the diorama of a future city, showcasing the theoretical endpoint of a scaled-up project and everlasting happiness.
Paper short abstract
We examine how actors seek to requalify hydrogen’s “greenness” by loosening criteria and promoting color agnostic approaches. Drawing on ethnographic and document research, we trace valuation tools shaping which hydrogen futures become legible—and which are sidelined.
Paper long abstract
As the hydrogen utopia has stumbled upon challenges, industry actors, scientists, and policymakers alike have started to reorient expectations, calling out for a shift “from green dreams to reality”. In this reorientation, the qualities of hydrogen are up for renegotiation, particularly how the greenness of hydrogen is - or should - be assessed. Various industry actors advocate a more “color-agnostic” approach and call for loosening the criteria for low carbon hydrogen or incorporating blue hydrogen from natural gas, in the name of accelerating upscaling and ensuring profitability. In this paper, we inquire into such attempts to requalify the greenness of hydrogen, and the contestations that follow, asking which concerns and values are rendered (in)visible in these valuation struggles, and what hydrogen futures they enact. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with industry actors, scientists, policymakers, and NGOs, supplemented by document analysis, we trace the tools of valuation and networks of expertise mobilized in debates around the recent review of the EU’s RFNBO (Renewable Fuels of Non-Biological Origin) certification. From an STS-lens, we analyze how these tools of expertise and valuation redistribute agencies among competing visions, whether oriented toward accelerated scaling, green growth, decarbonization, or energy sufficiency. We conclude by discussing the role of such tools in rendering certain energy futures more legible than others, with implications for climate action and potentially blocked alternative pathways.
Paper short abstract
A startup developing green hydrogen production becomes best known for hydrogen mobility projects. Drawing on a Chinese case and Scottish comparison, this paper examines how policy imaginaries and demonstration strategies reshape hydrogen innovation trajectories.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how hydrogen innovation trajectories are reshaped in emerging hydrogen sectors. It investigates a paradoxical case in which a Chinese startup focused on green hydrogen production and later became best known for a project supplying fuel cell vehicles using industrial by-product hydrogen. Why do certain technological pathways become prioritised over others?
Drawing on interviews, participant observations, and document analysis, the study analyses how a dominant sociotechnical imaginary of a “hydrogen mobility future” shapes technological expectations and policy priorities. In the Chinese context, this imaginary is operationalised through governance mechanisms such as deployment targets for local government evaluation and hydrogen demonstration clusters built upon earlier fuel cell industrial clusters. These arrangements translate imaginaries into infrastructures and demonstration projects.
For startups operating within this environment, aligning with dominant imaginaries becomes a strategy for survival. As hydrogen markets remain at an early stage and private investment is limited, companies often rely on local government funding obtained by establishing subsidiaries in different regions. This encourages startups to adapt technological narratives and participate in demonstration programmes.
The paper situates these dynamics within the broader “chicken-and-egg” dilemma of the hydrogen sector: green hydrogen remains costly due to limited demand, while demand remains limited without large-scale deployment. Highly visible applications, such as hydrogen mobility, therefore function as demand-creation strategies. Similar dynamics can also be observed in Scottish cases conducted by the author, suggesting that shifts in hydrogen innovation trajectories reflect not only governance structures but also the early-stage dynamics of emerging hydrogen industries.
Paper short abstract
In my contribution, I reflect on future failure as a central theme in the acceleration of green hydrogen. I examine how the looming presence and simultaneous absence of the future failure of implementing green hydrogen at scale shape discussions at hydrogen conferences and within hydrogen projects.
Paper long abstract
Hydrogen is presented as a key element of the energy transition. With its capacity to store energy from renewable sources, it carries the promise of leading the way toward climate neutrality. At the same time there is a lingering uncertainty about the success of establishing hydrogen technologies on a large scale. The discrepancy between the hope that hydrogen can fix the energy transition and skepticism about whether hydrogen technologies will in fact be widely implemented forms a tension deeply embedded in the promise of hydrogen.
Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and STS I examine this tension focusing on future failure as a central theme of the acceleration of green hydrogen. Building on participant observation at hydrogen conferences and interviews with experts working on hydrogen projects, I describe how future failure of the implementation of green hydrogen at large scale appears as both present and absent in expert discourse. This paradox emerges in speeches, panels, and informal conversations at hydrogen conferences. In my contribution I’ll ask: How is the possibility of future failure articulated, managed or displaced in hydrogen expert spaces?
Paper short abstract
Against the rising (and controversial) expectations currently made around hydrogen technologies, the purpose of this study is to gather insights from key stakeholders regarding the different possible hydrogen supply pathways, and compare how these perspectives differ regionally.
Paper long abstract
Expectations and hopes about hydrogen are currently reaching unprecedented levels and efforts to stabilise and institutionalise these expectations are being made. Nevertheless, within the context of a future decarbonised world, the field of hydrogen is subject to uncertainties and different potential future pathways exist. And despite current political and innovation efforts, different national visions and expectations about the role of hydrogen might hinder the coordination and development of a global hydrogen market. The purpose of this study is to gather insights from key stakeholders regarding the different possible hydrogen supply pathways, and compare how these perspectives differ regionally. This is a four-country comparison study, covering the UK, Norway, Spain and Germany as relevant countries involved in the development of a future hydrogen market. This study takes a closer look at the potential hydrogen supply pathways and aims to reveal the different perspectives and preferences of relevant hydrogen stakeholders (from the four countries of study). For that, this paper employs an innovative method known as multi-criteria mapping (MCM). MCM is a deliberative and participatory sustainability appraisal method which aims to accept complexity and “open up” different perspectives, arguments, and assumptions rather than “closing down” and arriving at single best solutions. By analysing and comparing mapping sessions by experts from different countries, the study aims to reveal region-specific perceptions of the sustainability performance of the formulated pathways and provide a basis for decision makers who aim at promoting a hydrogen transition.
Paper short abstract
Electrolysers require large amounts of materials and electricity to transform water into green hydrogen. This paper, based on ongoing research in Brittany (western France), demonstrates that this symbiosis may create environmental justice issues that actors may have to address.
Paper long abstract
Brittany, in western France, aims to develop green technologies to both transition away from fossil fuels and enhance its energy sovereignty. Green hydrogen plays an important role in this transition, supplying transportation systems and providing solutions for major local industries (public transportation, shipping, and the production and use of “billigs”, etc.). This development creates new forms of industrial symbiosis (Chertow, 2000), as electrolysers require significant amounts of electricity and water to produce green hydrogen. While constituting a potential solution for using captured CO₂ from major emitters through e-fuel production, it also creates new links between industries and materials. This talk aims to assess these new symbioses in terms of environmental and social justice. It highlights that new conflicts of use may emerge from these developments. However, rather than creating entirely new situations, this transition may instead tend to reinforce pre-existing injustices. This paper presents the results of a collective study conducted across several field sites in Brittany on the deployment of hydrogen technologies. It aims to lay the groundwork for a just energy transition by enabling stakeholders to rethink existing models of energy transition.