Presentation short abstract

The French Guiana solar-hydrogen project, framed as low-carbon progress, reveals eco-colonial dynamics. Indigenous resistance exposed imposed development and unequal energy justice. Drawing on fieldwork and political ecology, I show how colonial visions and internal fractures shaped the conflict.

Presentation long abstract

Green hydrogen is often represented as the last frontier of low-carbon energy and a silver bullet to slow down the climate crisis. When looked at more closely, though, this vision might be illusory. Like in the case of other low-carbon energy sources, hydrogen production could perpetuate dynamics of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment often emphasized in the political ecology and energy justice literature. In this article, I focus on a project implemented in a territory of Overseas France, namely French Guiana, where, in the late 2010s, French companies conceived plans for a a large solar-hydrogen power plant. The Electric Plant of Western Guiana promised to save CO2 emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guianese. In response, the Indigenous Kali’na communities living in the territories affected by the plant’s project staged a long-term opposition to it, criticizing the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, seen as a form of ‘eco-colonialism’, and bringing together a varied network on allies. However, the protest could not ultimately stop the project. Based on literature and document analysis, and on fieldwork conducted in French Guiana, I have examined this socio-environmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice and political ecology. From the analysis, it emerges that the conflict’s outcome was the result of: a) the colonial vision of Guianese land as a mere economic resource, propounded by the project’s advocates; b) the French State’s lack of recognition of an Indigenous specificity; c) internal fractures across Indigenous communities.

Presentation short abstract

The paper shows how hydrogen emerges as a contested frontier in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, deeply entangled with historical patterns of extractivism and fossil infrastructures, and shaped by overlapping dynamics of political participation, land control, and socio-environmental contestation.

Presentation long abstract

The global push for decarbonization has positioned South America as a key site for the extraction of so-called ‘transition minerals’ and the development of climate change commodities, including green hydrogen. This paper critically examines the emergence of hydrogen as a new frontier in three emblematic regions: Río Negro (Argentina), Magallanes (Chile), and La Guajira (Colombia). We argue that the hydrogen frontier is not a clean break from the past but rather a deeply entangled process, embedded in historical patterns of resource extraction and fossil fuel infrastructures.

Drawing on the concepts of frontiers, territorialization, and socio-technical imaginaries, we explore how the hydrogen economy is materializing in these regions. The analysis highlights how the hydrogen frontier is shaped by overlapping and often conflicting dynamics of political participation, land control, and socio-environmental contestation. While each case study reveals distinct territorial configurations and imaginaries—ranging from policy conflicts to neoliberal governance and contested energy transitions – they also share a common feature: the coexistence and mutual constitution of renewable energy projects and entrenched fossil fuel infrastructures.

By combining theoretical insights with empirical evidence from these three regions, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the layered, contingent, and contested nature of the hydrogen frontier in South America. It challenges deterministic framings of ‘green extractivism’ and instead emphasizes the complex and context-specific processes through which hydrogen materializes on the ground.

Presentation short abstract

Based on empirical studies in Algeria and Tunisia. We propose a comprehensive multi-level analysis of manifest and potential conflicts related to green hydrogen economies by systematically including the transnational and international level and their interlinkage to local and national conflicts.

Presentation long abstract

Existing scholarship on conflicts resulting from the energy transition and the export of renewable energy, including green hydrogen, focuses on land, energy and water, as well as political and socio-economic injustices at the sub-national and global level. We propose integrating these dimensions into a comprehensive multi-level analysis of manifest and potential conflicts related to green hydrogen economies by systematically including the transnational and international level and their interlinkage to local and national conflicts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a political economy perspective as well as an actor-centered approach are essential for understanding conflict dynamics. We develop this multi-level analysis building on case studies on Algeria and Tunisia. Both countries have recently adopted green hydrogen strategies in response to increased demand from the EU, yet their political and economic landscapes differ significantly. Based on original empirical material from stakeholder interviews conducted in both countries, we explore the interconnections between existing political and socio-economic conflicts and emerging hydrogen conflicts. While the conflicts we observe are still of low intensity, there is a risk of increasing political violence due to the authoritarian contexts. The article concludes with reflections on the opportunities and limitations of conflict prevention in the context of the energy transition.

Presentation short abstract

Using a mixed-methods approach, the study maps capital flows to Ceará’s “H2V Hub” by tracing planned and executed investments and incentives between 2022 and 2032. This strategy allows identifying who captures its economic benefits and how its implementation reinforces North–South asymmetries.

Presentation long abstract

The new “green” hydrogen (GH2) frontier advances in Global South driven by Europe’s current energy constraints and growing demand for low-carbon alternatives, and finds in Brazil and especially in Ceará State, a key expansion area, due to its favorable energetic and geographic conditions. In this context, Brazil seeks to expand its GH2 industry, through subsidies and incentives to attract foreign investments. However, Brazil's implementation model relies on importing technologies from the North to deploy the GH2 production chain, which, once in place, will be oriented to export the GH2 in large-scale on its low-value form as ammonia. This model may entail a set of structural implications for Brazil, such as internalizing socio-environmental impacts, constraining the decarbonization of the national industry sectors and turns the GH2 into a commodity, factors that restrict the generation of economic benefits and reinforces asymmetries and dependency patterns under a “green” narrative. These structural implications remain largely unexplored in the literature on GH2 and energy transitions. Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines interviews with port officials and public managers with systematic analysis of secondary data to examine the emerging capital flows associated with the “Green Hydrogen Hub” at Pecém Industrial and Port Complex (CIPP) in Ceará, tracing planned and executed investments and incentives between 2022 and 2032. The study contributes to debate by identifying who benefits economically from Ceará’s GH2 and highlighting the origin and destination of the financial resources mobilized to this new energy frontier.

Presentation short abstract

Building on the European Green Deal’s promotion of Green Hydrogen (GrH2), we argue that the hydrogen frontier reconfigures rather than transcends the historical architectures of fossil capitalism and colonial modernity. Here we examine material and financial spatial aspects of H2Med infrastructures.

Presentation long abstract

Building on the European Green Deal’s promotion of Green Hydrogen (GrH2), we argue that the hydrogen frontier reconfigures rather than transcends the historical architectures of fossil capitalism and colonial modernity.

The paper examines the H2Med corridor, co-developed by ENAGÁS (Spain), REN (Portugal), and GRTgaz and Teréga (France), envisioned as an axis in the European Hydrogen Backbone. Still largely in its design phase, H2Med already mobilizes substantial political, financial and territorial commitments that reveal its capacity to reorder socioecological relations. The province of Huelva in southern Spain illustrates the entanglements and frictions generated by this process. Hydrogen development intersects with longstanding conflicts over aquifer depletion, land access, and industrial pollution, while also introducing new uncertainties related to chemical waste, brine disposal and intensified energy demands. These overlapping dynamics show how H2Med produces hybrid and contradictory spaces where green infrastructures merge with fossil legacies, agrarian livelihoods and ecological vulnerabilities.

A central contribution of the paper is to highlight a paradox at the heart of the hydrogen frontier. Although H2Med is framed as a project enhancing European energy sovereignty, a significant proportion of the capital enabling the hydrogen transition originates from sovereign wealth funds of states historically constituted as fossil peripheries within the twentieth-century international oil order. In this sense, the financing of H2Med exemplifies how Southern capital subsidizes Northern energy transitions, even as Southern territories continue to serve as extraction zones for renewable and fossil resources. The hydrogen transition thus rearticulates, rather than resolves, the geopolitical and financial logics of fossil modernity.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines South Africa’s green hydrogen frontier at Boegoebaai in the Northern Cape, highlighting colonial continuities, financialisation, and contested state–capital relations. Drawing on socio‑economic data and public consultations, it foregrounds justice and local voices.

Presentation long abstract

South Africa’s vast, remote Northern Cape province, marked by its fragile dryland ecosystems and sparse population, is positioned as a strategic hub for global decarbonisation, exemplified by the proposed Boegoebaai Green Hydrogen Export Hub in the Richtersveld. Yet, these transitions unfold within landscapes scarred by enduring extractive legacies and colonial dispossession, raising urgent questions about energy justice and local sovereignty. This paper critically examines how the green hydrogen frontier risks reproducing historical patterns of exclusion. Drawing on the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), including socio-economic reports and public consultation outcomes, the analysis highlights local concerns regarding livelihoods, land security, and ecological fragility within this vulnerable environment. These community voices emphasise how global finance and trade aggressively collide with the everyday realities of poverty and historical exclusion in this geographically marginalised region. The Northern Cape's history of copper and diamond mining has long enriched external actors while systemically impoverishing local communities. Green hydrogen projects risk extending these colonial continuities by framing the remote, semi-arid land as both empty and underutilised, thereby justifying the sidelining of traditional governance and embedding epistemic exclusions within narratives of "sustainable development." The Boegoebaai case demonstrates how hard-won land restitution victories are potentially undermined when the state seeks to lease communal land to foreign investors under opaque terms. The findings stress the urgent need for structural reforms that move beyond "green extractivism," ensuring that the unique ecological and socio-economic vulnerabilities of this remote semi-arid province are central to a just energy transition.

Presentation short abstract

White or geogenic hydrogen has acquired a kind of innocent gaze. This contribution explores new features of hydrogen extractivism by mapping actors and sites and by investigating futuristic and pre-apocalyptic energy narratives that frame this radical expansion of the hydrogen frontier.

Presentation long abstract

White or geogenic hydrogen has acquired a kind of innocent gaze, although its commercial use would prolong the resource extractivist paradigm and would expand the hydrogen frontier to previously unknown terrains. Prospecting operations in Mali and Albania brought geoscientists to question the hitherto common assumption that accumulations of H2 could not exist in the subsurface. Exploration for geologic hydrogen is currently underway in Albania, Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Oman, Spain, and the United States, further fuelled by the ‘game-changing’ launch of the recent U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which predicts that there are up to five trillion tons of natural hydrogen in the Earth's crust. Currently, a debate is unfolding that mainly revolves around prospecting, drilling, fracking, large-scale use, and the development of appliances. Informed by an interest in critical geography, green extractivism, and science/technology studies, this contribution

- Maps the actors and sites of white hydrogen exploration to document recent developments and demonstrate the extent to which the political economy of hydrogen extraction prolongs existing power relations in mining and particularly fracking.

- recaptures the status of the mostly tech-driven debate in science and politics, its gaps, shortcomings and obsessions/futuristic predictions.

- demonstrates how this stabilizes a phenomenon labelled as “energy innocence”: the framing of certain energy sources as clean and sustainable by willfully excluding, underestimating, or conflating their socioecological repercussions and indulging in ecomodernist mindsets and imaginaries.

Presentation short abstract

a transdisciplinary interaction between chemistry and political ecology engaging the multiplicity of hydrogen’s material, political and semiotic ecologies. Daily engagements with hydrogen in the lab, we open up registers of dealing with chemicals in current and future more-than-human worlds.

Presentation long abstract

The (discursive) urgency of the so-called “climate crisis” propels green hydrogen into the position of saviour that safeguards present Northern utopias. The political-ecological idea of “abundance” of the sun, especially in distant but linked geographies like Namibia, South Africa, Oman, Brazil, Chile, Oaxaca…, depoliticizes any concerns around the violence of these (new) colonial schemes. Green hydrogen, praised for its “absence of CO2 footprint”, emerges as an assemblage of hidden new colonial entanglements and consumption of material bodies. Water, sun, wind, soil, land, labour are captured, projecting ancestral illegitimate debts into the possible futures. The price of green hydrogen becomes uncomeasurable with life. What means are there to reckon the actual cost of these technological dreamworlds? Both mainstream politics, science and industry, as well as critics have turned to holistic life cycle thinking of supply chains to achieve a more ecological and just way of dealing with molecular substances, like hydrogen (Papadopoulos, 2021). However, others have challenged LCA’s predominance as the way to engage critically with green (colonialist) solutions for its status-quo affirming politics (Ventura, 2022; Smit, Biliskov & Tsagkari, 2025). Similar to how Bonelli & Gamba (2024) have explored the ancestral underground roots of lithium between Chilean extraction and a German chemistry lab, this paper presents a transdisciplinary interaction between chemistry and political ecology that engages with the multiplicity of hydrogen’s material, political and semiotic ecologies. Starting at daily engagements with hydrogen in the lab, we open up registers of dealing with chemicals in current and future more-than-human worlds.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses how social movements in Magallanes contest Chile’s green hydrogen frontier. Drawing on 2024/2026 fieldwork and HMPA, it highlights conflict-transformative strategies, barriers, and post-development visions confronting a progressive yet extractivist government.

Presentation long abstract

Chile has become a strategic site within the emerging green hydrogen frontier, promoted as both a decarbonization solution for Europe and a development pathway for the Global South. Drawing on a historical materialist political ecology perspective (Martinez-Alier, 2015; Brand et al., 2022; Kalt et al., 2023), this paper builds on the analysis of how the frontier in Magallanes is produced through state–corporate alliances, green finance, and narratives of progress that obscure colonial continuities (Escobar, 1995; Gudynas, 2011; Svampa, 2019) and uneven territorial transformations. Drawing on earlier work on the structural limits of hydrogen’s transformative potential (Tost & Rammer, forthcoming) and Chile’s gH₂ policy-making via Historical Materialist Political Analysis (HMPA), the paper integrates findings from field research in late 2024 and early 2026.

Based on interviews, participant observation, and engagement with local social and environmental justice actors, the paper examines how movements interpret, resist, and reimagine the frontier. Rather than focusing on coordination among movements, the analysis centres on the conflict-transformative strategies (Temper et al., 2018), political practices, and future visions mobilised by actors as they confront a progressive government that discursively aligned with their claims yet materially advanced an export-oriented, extractivist hydrogen model.

Findings highlight three dynamics: (1) how enclosures of land, energy, and knowledge reproduce patterns of dependency; (2) barriers movements face contesting frontier-making in uneven “contact zones” (Cezne & Otsuki, 2025); and (3) situated and pluriversal post-development visions— ranging from territorial self-determination to agroecological futures —that challenge the imaginary of hydrogen-led green industrialization.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines South Africa’s hydrogen ambitions as an instance of the “private turn” in development finance. It argues that the LCOH is a political technology that fixes the future to the horizon of bankability, while deferring redistributive responses to inequality and energy poverty.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines South Africa’s green hydrogen ambitions from the perspective of the “private turn” in development finance, where blended finance and de-risking recast states as guarantors of finance capital, oprganising public policy around the promise of private gain. In South Africa, the logic of de-risking and drive for bankability converges with hydrogen policy; yet green hydrogen remains suspended in an anticipatory impasse: central to decarbonisation and just transition narratives, but commercially too costly to pursue and largely failing to attract the required investment.

Rather than treat this stalled flow of private capital as an anomaly, I treat it as an entry point to examine the labour of making futures investible. The paper argues that the Levelised Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) has become a key political technology in this process. Far from a neutral metric, LCOH operates as a calculative technology that carries a distinct theory of value and a theory of action: it defines hydrogen’s worth in narrowly techno-economic terms, (re)organises public policy around bankability, and produces geographies of export across the Global South.

Using South Africa as a case, I trace how LCOH rationality is institutionalised in public science, financing architectures, and speculative territorial projects. Here, green hydrogen frontier-making reveals how the demand for bankability narrows what counts as sustainable development, creating a situation where decisions in the present are dictated by speculative expectations about the future, while redistributive responses to inequality and energy poverty are continually deferred.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines green hydrogen’s emergence in Chilean Patagonia, focusing on socio-ecological narratives shaping the region’s role in global decarbonization. It highlights entrenched extractive logics and potential new environmental sacrifice zones, revealing tensions around hydrogen projects.

Presentation long abstract

Green hydrogen has recently become a key energy vector in global decarbonization efforts, primarily promoted as a sustainable solution to meet European energy demand. Its rise aligns with broader shifts toward green technologies and low-carbon futures, with renewable production methods like wind power seen as crucial for achieving climate goals and transforming energy systems globally. However, despite these promises, the expansion of green hydrogen projects in the Global South presents significant challenges, intimately linked to entrenched extractive logics and enduring patterns of uneven development. In Chilean Patagonia, the rapid industrial growth exemplifies what has been conceptualized as green extractivism: a contemporary reconfiguration of territorial appropriation and resource exploitation legitimised by energy transition discourses but perpetuating socio-environmental inequalities. This dynamic subordinates local ecosystems and communities to the decarbonization priorities of the Global North.

Consequently, Chile’s southernmost region, Patagonia, is undergoing a transformation driven by state actors and transnational corporations into a strategic ‘development pole’ for large-scale hydrogen production and export. This trajectory is based on the extensive establishment of wind farms and mega ports. It carries unknown environmental risks and marginalizes regional energy priorities, since hydrogen production is not intended to support local decarbonization. Drawing upon emergent fieldwork, document analysis, and interviews, this study examines how local communities, environmental organizations, and regional authorities negotiate the socio-ecological ramifications of hydrogen megaprojects, thereby shaping an energy future with planetary-scale implications. Persistent concerns include biodiversity loss and encroachment on protected natural areas, highlighting complex socio-ecological tensions inherent to this emerging sector.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation introduces the Special Issue “Green Hydrogen in the Global South: Politics, Spaces, and Transformations”, published in Political Geography, and highlights key theoretical and empirical contributions.

Presentation long abstract

Green hydrogen is embraced as a key pillar of global energy transition agendas. As a flexible energy carrier for hard-to-decarbonize sectors, it is key to strategies for enhancing energy security, economic competitiveness, and sustainable development. While its global rollout remains uncertain, hydrogen is already reshaping the political geographies of energy, especially in the Global South. Many countries with abundant and untapped renewable resources anticipate export and investment opportunities while seeking local value creation through ‘green’ industrialization. This presentation introduces the Special Issue “Green Hydrogen in the Global South: Politics, Spaces, and Transformations”, published in Political Geography. The SI represents the first major collection of articles approaching, from social science perspectives, different hydrogen-related issues and case studies in the Global South. The SI coheres around three interrelated axes of inquiry. First, it examines how global and domestic power relations shape hydrogen development and asks who benefits from value creation and resource flows, and who bears the socio-ecological and economic risks. Second, it considers the spatial changes linked to hydrogen infrastructures, including land and water use, socio-ecological conflicts, and emerging forms of ‘green’ extractivism and ‘green’ colonialism. Third, it explores transformative potentials to move beyond extractivist and neocolonial patterns toward ‘green’ industrialization and energy justice. Together, the contributions advance the growing field of critical hydrogen studies. They show how hydrogen provides a crucial entry point for analyzing the politics, spaces, and transformations associated with ‘green’ transitions and chart pathways toward just, inclusive and decolonial energy futures.