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- Convenors:
-
Alexandre Violle
(Mines Paris)
Brice Laurent (Mines Paris)
Guillaume Louvet (Ecole des Mines de Paris)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the material dimensions of the energy transition amid a global mining boom for critical minerals. It examines how various actors construct knowledge and visions of future transitions and mining, the controversies these generate, and their political implications worldwide.
Description
The mineral foundations on which the energy transition relies are becoming an increasingly prominent and politicized issue in both the Global North and South. To electrify a wide range of uses and move away from a fossil-fuel-based world, resources such as lithium, rare earth elements, and copper are required to produce transition technologies (wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles). In Europe, the connection between transition and extraction is also driven by concerns related to sovereignty and security of supply, in order to strengthen political autonomy vis-à-vis other powers such as Russia or China. However, this renewed promotion of the mining industry is highly contested, both by local communities affected by extraction projects and by a variety of organizations calling for demand-reduction policies and ecological resource planning.
This panel explores the material dimensions of the energy transition by examining how a variety of public and private actors produce and mobilize expert knowledge about its possible futures. Several questions will be addressed: How do actors construct knowledge about desirable futures for mining and raw materials? What controversies surround these forms of knowledge? How do they reshape—or fail to reshape—the ways mining is governed, conceptualized, or implemented across the world? How do actors problematize the energy transition in relation to materiality, and what are the political consequences of this process?
The panel will focus on expert knowledge produced by academic disciplines—such as law, geology, or economics—policy practices that mobilize these disciplines, and situated forms of knowledge developed by those directly affected by energy transition projects, including communities impacted by mining. This panel contributes to recent STS scholarship on the making of futures and on the politics of expertise.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Anticipatory models have limited practical impact because they tend to ignore local contexts. Using experiments with models, we argue that taking the material dimension of transition seriously offers resources to reopen anticipatory practices and rethink transition expertise and its critique.
Paper long abstract
Anticipatory models such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are instruments of expert knowledge that have political implications. They participate in problematizing the socio-economic evolutions while defining the role of experts in relation with decision-makers. STS has analyzed these models and provided resources to understand the challenge they face when they attempt to produce global knowledge for the sake of actors embedded in diverse socio-cultural contexts. This raises an important epistemic and political question: how can transition futures be produced in ways that genuinely enhance actors’ capacities for action? In this paper, we argue that taking seriously the material dimension of transition offers resources for reopening anticipatory practices and rethinking transition expertise and its critique.
We analyze an ongoing experiment in which we are involved alongside modelers and local actors. First, we show that this experimentation requires rethinking the very production of models so as to blur, as far as possible, the boundary between modelers and potential users. Second, we show that this approach transforms the posture of expertise: rather than establishing trajectories, the task becomes one of collectively investigating problems. Finally, it calls for rethinking the role of the STS researcher, who performs critique together with actors and modelers in ways that help articulate problems and reflect on the distribution of winners and losers in transitions.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines innovation in production technologies undertaken by the lithium industry. Despite the hype and investments, these innovations remain experimental, in part due to the idiosyncrasy - or ontological fluidity - of lithium and its host brine.
Paper long abstract
Innovation is central to so-called green technologies, needed for advancing towards the elimination of fossil fuels from energy production and use. Scholars argue that innovation produces economic growth, captures wealth, and generates better, more efficient consumer goods, and thus have penned numerous studies of innovation in battery and EV supply chains. By contrast to consumer goods, this paper examines innovation in production technologies undertaken by the lithium industry, which many see as essential for expanding production beyond existing mines and in ways that they claim will be more ecologically sustainable. These methods, called “direct lithium extraction” or DLE for short, use filtering devices to glean lithium from its host environment, usually a brine mixture of water, salts, and other elements (some of the also commercially valuable). Despite the hype and investments, DLE remains experimental, as companies struggle to make the technology scalable and durable. One obstacle they face is the idiosyncrasy of each brine, where unique natural environments translate into needing also unique innovations and knowledges. Based on an analysis of interviews, technical reports, and an analytical framework that reflects insights from the STS literature on laboratories and world-making, this article examines how companies are managing this uniqueness through an analysis of operations, planned and piloted, at the Maricunga Salt flat in northern Chile.
Paper short abstract
Deep-sea mining in Norway is framed as necessary for the green transition. Drawing on interviews and policy analysis, this paper shows how different experts construct extraction as responsible, sustainable and future-oriented or not, shaping the moral economy of transition minerals.
Paper long abstract
With the growing demand for materials in the name of digital transitions and, more broadly, the green energy transition, the deep seabed has emerged as the next new frontier of resource extraction. In 2024, Norway moved to open parts of its continental shelf for the exploration and potential extraction of deep-sea minerals. Not surprisingly, this has been a highly contested issue.
This paper examines how knowledge of different actors is mobilized, how justifications are crafted to frame deep-sea mining as a necessary, responsible, sustainable and future-oriented activity and how opposing views are expressed.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with scientists, policy makers and civil society actors alongside an analysis of public communications, regulatory documents and environmental impact assessments, we investigate how the opening of continental shelf for exploration and potential extraction is constructed, negotiated and contested.
We show how competing kinds of expertise do not simply make an assessment of feasibility but shape the moral economy of deep-sea mineral extraction. This means negotiating what counts as responsible extraction, acceptable uncertainties, and how to balance different forms of risk. While we see multiple frictions in these narratives, we also witness that they not only turn to scientific evidence but also to competing visions of Norway’s (and Europe’s) future and its material foundations.
This paper is based on research conducted as part of the ERC Advances Grant ‘Innovation Residues: Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures’ (Grant Agreement: 10105480).
Paper short abstract
I explore tensions between the two groups who are at the forefront of energy industry digitalisation: maintainers and innovators. The unique materalities of hardware and software systems complicate collaborations but do not exclude the possibility of alignment.
Paper long abstract
Digitalisation of the grid promises a sustainable energy system. However, we do not fully understand how innovative technologies are introduced—and challenged—in legacy infrastructures. In this talk, I explore how energy industry practitioners in the UK perform alignment work to incorporate novel digital tools into existing systems, while remaining aware of their unique materialities. I present my argument in three parts. First, a new wave of digitalisation challenges an established order of pre-planned and highly assured infrastructure engineering with agile and experimental innovation practices. However, this is not happening without pushback from professionals responsible for safety and stability of supply who usually operate under strict constraints related to the hardware systems they’re looking after. Second, I show how software innovators and legacy maintainers temporarily leave their roles to align their practices and bridge their respective communities. By arriving at shared understanding of “testing” and “errors,” both groups advance digitalisation while remaining cognisant of the unique temporalities and materialities of energy infrastructures. Third, the negotiations are aligned by the shared goal of cybersecurity, which is reframed as a solution to bring together the divergent epistemic cultures found across the industry. What emerges as a result is digitalisation enacted on terms shared by innovators and maintainers; a piecemeal, contested, and slow process, resistant to the dominant cultural narrative of urgency and haste.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how knowledge about the mineral requirements of the energy transition in France is produced and governed. It shows how several communities of experts across policy arenas shape anticipatory expertise through competing problem framings, and how this influences transition planning.
Paper long abstract
The material foundations of the energy transition are increasingly visible as governments anticipate growing demand for critical minerals. Yet the integration of mineral resource concerns into low-carbon transition planning remains uneven. This paper examines how expert knowledge about the mineral requirements of the energy transition is produced and mobilized within fragmented policy arenas.
The analysis focuses on the French case, where energy–climate policy and mineral resource policy are largely developed within separate administrative and expert communities, raising the issue of governing and coordinating the production of expert knowledge. Drawing on qualitative research conducted as part of an ongoing PhD project—including interviews with experts and policymakers, document analysis, and archival material—the paper traces how different expert actors construct anticipatory knowledge about the future material needs of the energy transition.
The findings show that anticipatory expertise is shaped by organizational contexts, with diverse policy arenas and competing ways of problematizing mineral resources. While some actors frame the problem primarily through concerns of supply security and industrial competitiveness, others attempt to connect these issues to broader questions of resource sufficiency and environmental limits. These different framings shape the tools used to anticipate the material consequences of the energy transition, influencing which material constraints are rendered visible or remain ignored.
By examining how institutional boundaries and interactions between expert communities structure the production of anticipatory knowledge, the paper contributes to STS debates on the politics of expertise and the making of energy transition futures by highlighting their organizational dimension.
Paper short abstract
Collaborative life among diverse actors involved in critical minerals and energy transitions research is increasingly structured by intimate preoccupations with collective viability, rather than with the processes of epistemic differentiation often foregrounded in analyses of interdisciplinarity.
Paper long abstract
Despite the many policy goals and geopolitical vulnerabilities surrounding the production of rare earth elements (REEs), Western governments, universities, and large corporations all remain loathe to support REE-focused innovation through intermediate stages of commercialization – a zone that financiers refer to as the “valley of death.” Consequently, the vast majority of this research is performed by small companies and groups whose horizons are defined not by shared political visions or epistemic commitments, but by their lack of durable institutional attachments and their relentless search for capital. This talk follows an ad-hoc collaboration between rural university students, a mineral exploration company, and U.S. national laboratory researchers brought together to develop processes for REE-focused biological mining. I explore how participants conceptualize their own particular “valley of death” while imagining future relationships with other researchers and articulating senses of place. As calls intensify for collaborative innovation on problems surrounding critical minerals even as the risks of research flow to individual researchers, small firms, and communities near extractive sites, I argue that collaborative life among the diverse actors pursuing energy transitions research is increasingly structured by intimate preoccupations with viability, rather than with the processes of epistemic differentiation often foregrounded in analyses of interdisciplinarity.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines the CNDP’s public debates on a proposed lithium mine in France. It argues that the futures of mine’s materiality—its boundaries, infrastructures, environmental impacts—is put to the test. As industrial promises of a mine “clean” project are challenged as public issues.
Paper long abstract
This presentation proposes to examine the public debates organized in France by the Commission Nationale du Débat Public (CNDP) in 2024 concerning the future opening of a lithium mine in the Allier. These debates have already been analysed in the literature to explore the controversies surrounding the notion of “energy transition”. I will develop the argument that the materiality of the mine, its boundaries, and its relationship to its environment are themselves matters of debate. The use of drones to monitor underground chambers for potential cracks caused by runoff water, and underground pipelines to transport the extracted material, are among the technological promises put forward by the industrial operator to deliver a clean and safe mine. I propose to analyze the CNDP’s consultation process as a site of problematization where the futures of the mine’s materiality are tested by different actors, and where they emerge “at the intersection of a singular social and economic history” (Zonabend, 2007). In particular, I will show how the argument of rendering the mine’s nuisances invisible, put forward by the industrial operator to justify the plant’s proximity to local residents, is transformed into a public issue by actors concerned with the possible “spillovers of the mine” (Cerceau and Laurent, 2023) and its risks of pollution. The consultation process also has long-term effects, as it structures the forms of opposition and the logics of public demonstration adopted by the actors who have engaged in the
debates.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines valuation controversies over mining revenues through discounted cash flow models. Drawing on empirical materials including fieldwork in Madagascar, it shows how investors, administrations and civil society confront financial models to negotiate future revenue sharing.
Paper long abstract
The energy transitions are intensifying the demand for critical minerals. This renews typical concerns in economic geography regarding how value derived from mining activity is shared and contributes to local development. The aim of this paper is to investigate valuation and distribution controversies by examining the practical uses and confrontations surrounding key calculating devices used in mining contexts: discounted cash flow models.
These models are widely used across the finance and mining industries to design business models and govern future investment decisions. They are also used by banks, international organisations, arbitration courts and increasingly by civil society organisations and resource-rich country administrations seeking to control, challenge and negotiate revenue sharing with mining firms operating in their countries.
The paper draws on empirical materials collected in Madagascar in 2022 as well as exploratory interviews conducted with European and African actors since 2024. It mobilises pragmatic approaches to valuation and STS finance literature to analyse how models are used to govern, value and construct complex objects, such as resources and mining projects, embedded in complex spatial relations including global production networks and wealth chains.
The paper shows that valuation controversies over resources, and the promised revenues associated with them, are entangled in competing uses of models between investors’ rationalities and knowledge, the capacities of administrations and civil society to advance alternative value narratives, and broader pricing mechanisms. It also shows that behind the technical appearance of models promoted by international organisations and experts, their uses are instrumentalised and embedded in power relations.
Paper short abstract
Norway's mineral strategy for critical minerals faces local protests. The more than 40 minerals of the Materials Library of Stones provide public engagement, applying Haraway's "becoming-with, living-with, dying-with" framework for interdisciplinary mineral literacy amid energy transition demands.
Paper long abstract
In 2025, the Norwegian government introduced a new law on mineral activities and the management of mineral resources. The new law seeks to establish “a more sustainable and efficient management and utilisation of mineral resources in Norway”. The law supports the Norwegian Mineral Strategy, a white paper promoting mineral mining on land and in the sea. Even though there is a temporary moratorium on deep-sea mining, the 2026 state budget has set aside 16 million Euros to prepare for future deep-sea mining activities.
Norway has a long mining tradition, and the mining industry has gained renewed importance in securing access to so-called critical minerals for the energy transitions. New mining sites are proposed and planned, while some closed mines are in the process of reopening. These mining activities have resulted in protests by local communities.
Knowledge about minerals is the domain of geology and chemistry. To promote public mineral literacy, we designed a Materials Library of Stones as an interdisciplinary and “thinkivist” intervention. It consists of a collection of more than 40 stones containing minerals for the digital and energy transitions. The library enables ways of knowing minerals through tangible interaction and storytelling.
Based on the work by Donna Haraway, this paper explores how humans are “becoming-with, “living-with”, and “dying-with” stones and their minerals. It will present some experiences with the Materials Library of Stones as a “thinkivist” project, as well as reflections by visitors engaging with the library.
Paper short abstract
This study explores how China's electricity market reforms redefine energy transition as a problem of system flexibility and market coordination at this stage. It shows how expert knowledge drives material infrastructures' demand such as storage, grid expansion, and ancillary services.
Paper long abstract
In mainstream narratives, energy transition is often understood as a process driven primarily by the expansion of renewable energy technologies. The resulting challenges of renewable integration require extensive material infrastructures to support the operation of the electricity system. However, existing research pays limited attention to how energy transition is initially defined and organized through expert knowledge frameworks.
Taking China as a case, this paper explores how electricity market reform has emerged as a key policy pathway to address renewable integration and system flexibility challenges in the current stage of development. Drawing on economic and policy expertise, market reform introduces price signals and trading mechanisms that reshape the governance of electricity systems. These mechanisms have promoted the development of ancillary service markets and further influenced the construction of key infrastructures such as energy storage and grid networks.
This paper argues that market design should not be understood merely as an institutional arrangement. It represents a form of expert knowledge practice that defines system problems and proposes particular solutions. In doing so, it reshapes the infrastructure demands and material pathways of energy transition. By analysing this process, the study provides a new perspective on the relationship between the politics of knowledge and infrastructure development in energy transitions.
Paper short abstract
The modeled scope of a hydrothermal reservoir in the German state of Bavaria does not align with the region's surface geopolitical boundaries. Our contribution thus explores how the scientific discovery of the hydrothermal reservoir reconfigures geomaterial and geopolitical boundaries.
Paper long abstract
This contribution explores how the so-called Molasse Basin – a water-bearing reservoir located underneath parts of the German State of Bavaria at depths of up to 5000m – was discovered to make deep geothermal energy a promising energy future for the region. To capture the potential of the Molasse Basin, the Bavarian government commissioned geologists to assess the reservoir. Interestingly, the modeled scope of the reservoir in the material underground, as an interconnected basin, does not match the geopolitical boundaries of the region on the surface. Our contribution thus explores how the scientific discovery of the Molasse Basin reconfigures geomaterial and geopolitical boundaries. The analysis of eighteen interviews and document data illustrates how experts actively contribute to opening up and closing down the horizon of action across material, cognitive, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Expert assessment of the Molasse Basin problematized incoherent ‘islands’ of deep geothermal energy plants and a mismatch between the underground geothermal reservoir and surface energy sinks. To make efficient and long-term use of the potential, experts shifted from local heat-mining models to reservoir management models. By projecting the potential of the interconnected reservoir, experts also bring novel objects of expertise and policy-making, such as intercommunal heat networks, into being and make formerly unthinkable notions of a shared energy resource across geopolitical boundaries acceptable and governable. Therewith, knowledge of hydrothermal reservoirs not only reconfigures relationships with the material underground but also shapes trajectories for governing the energy transition on the surface.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses the new modes of technospheric governance emerging with the mining of energy waste for rare earth elements, emphasizing the ambivalent tensions between well-intended attempts of upcycling geo-chemical waste and the undue appropriation of historical violence and harm.
Paper long abstract
The growing demand for Rare Earth elements has prompted renewed interest in industrial waste as a potential source of rare earth minerals and metals deemed critical to a less resource-intensive economy. With total demand expected to double or triple by 2040-2050, governments are making substantial investments in developing new methods for separating chemical elements from processed geological materials to meet the projected surge. Building on current attempts to mine energy waste inherited from the Soviet period in Estonia, this talk discusses the techno-scientific imaginaries undergirding the shift from primary to secondary extraction, paying particular attention to the narrow calculus of energy in the transition from waste to product in the name of a resource-efficient, circular economy. The speculative engagement with the geo-chemical properties of industrial waste hinges on computational and calculative techniques in which the violence of forced labour and disposession this waste embodies no longer registers, and the uneven distribution of risks, utility and value attached to human and non-human labour is both reconstituted and normalised. In this way, secondary extraction can be understood as the optimisation of metabolic flows for accumulation, ushering in modes of techno-spheric governance that thrive on the collective fallout of historical violence and harm.