Contribution short abstract:

Hydrogen is depicted as the environment-friendly method for electricity production. Following a plan to build a hydrogen plant in an indigeouns area of French Guyana, a clash occurred between the local people and building firms, also in terms of opposing narratives of progerss and preservation.

Contribution long abstract:

In recent years, hydrogen has become of the renewable energy industry’s favorite buzzwords. It is often depicted as the environment-friendly techno-fix that will make electricity generated from solar and wind power storable and tradable on world markets. That techno-optimistic vision clashes with on-ground reality. In 2020, three French companies conceived plans for the world's largest solar-hydrogen power plant in northwest French Guyana. The Electric Plant of West Guyana promised to save CO2 emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guyanese. Local customary chiefs belonging to the indigenous Kali’na people rejected the project from the outset. Local authorities criticized the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, which they see as a form of ‘eco-colonialism’. While the Kali’na people are also resorting to juridical arguments to fight against the plant, they principally oppose the vision of their territory as no one’s land, propagated by the industrial environment, and instead defend an alternative vision based on “a certain form of slowness and modesty”. Based on fieldwork, I have examined this socio-environmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice and discursive analysis. I have integrated the analysis of energy justice with an examination of the valuation languages of project proponents and detractors to highlight the idiosyncratic worldviews that underlie these languages. I then conducted a semantic analysis of a corpus of media and interviews collected and extracted several themes, which I classified as belonging to different languages of valuation.