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.