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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.