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.