Presentation short abstract

We examine the representation of green hydrogen in print media and public policies across three different energy geographies: Argentina, Denmark, and Spain. Our analysis reveals that these processes are performative and serve to consolidate existing socio-economic orders.

Presentation long abstract

Green hydrogen and its derivatives have become centrepieces to the transition away from fossil-based economies. This article examines the public policies and representations in print media of green hydrogen across three different energy geographies: Argentina, Denmark and Spain.

It is within this contextual diversity that this article employs a relational comparison of the framings of green hydrogen, asking how green hydrogen come to be stabilized as a solution, and what kind of problem it is a solution to.

We aim to understand the ways in which the prefiguration of hydrogen futures shapes both the present and the future. The article is based on a systematic content analysis of the national hydrogen policies in the three countries and a framing analysis of the representations of green hydrogen. We have conducted a data scraping of public representations of green hydrogen in newspapers in each country between May 2023 and May 2024 followed by a detailed analysis of the content of these. This allows us to trace the ways in which green hydrogen as a technology enrolls a host of different actors at local level, both feeding on and reshaping existing discourses on local development, sovereignty and interconnectedness. The relational comparison of the ways that the energy futures are stabilized and naturalized around the industrial complex of green hydrogen reveals how these are indeed performative, discursively producing the problems that they are intended to solve while consolidating existing socio-economic orders.