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Paper short abstract

The 2019 European Green Deal aimed to phase out fossil fuels. Yet instead new incentives soon expanded financial support for natural gas, thus making its role more resilient. The EU justified this support through a techno-market fix, based on sociotechnical-spatial imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

The term ‘resilience’ has connoted more environmentally sustainable futures, as in the phrase ‘socio-ecological resilience’, yet it can mean the opposite. For several years, renewable energy has been promoted as a resilient means to transition beyond fossil fuels. The 2019 European Green Deal aimed ‘to create a cleaner, healthier and climate-neutral Europe’, especially by phasing out fossil fuels. European countries were anyway producing only 10% of their natural gas usage, while importing the rest as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). Within a few years, however, EU policy was subsidising new infrastructure to perpetuate natural gas production and LNG imports. To justify this support, the EU rebranded natural gas as a ‘transition fuel’: Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) would decarbonise it, while also creating new value chains for CCS technology. ‘clean hydrogen’ and even CO2. This techno-market fix initially focused on industrial sectors that were ‘hard-to-abate’. but expanded more generally to natural gas. EU policy financed new incentives for ‘hydrogen-ready’ gas pipelines, called valleys or connectors; such metaphors imply linking energy, knowledge and people for their mutual benefit. As an even better future, this infrastructure would facilitate an eventual shift towards hydrolysing water to produce zero-carbon hydrogen from renewable energy, imagined as abundantly available. Moreover, Germany’s investments have sought to site ‘clean hydrogen’ production in North Africa, drawing on its solar energy production, as an economic development model. In all those ways, sociotechnical-spatial imaginaries have helped to make natural gas a more resilient energy supply for Europe, thus perpetuationg carbon emissions.