Reconversions
Spaces
Infrastructures
Concepts
Strategies
Jorrit Smit (he/him) is a Brussels-based STS researcher with a background in physical chemistry, philosophy and history of science. He is part of the Belgian More than Enough campaign and called for a more activist STS practice. Jorrit holds postdoctoral positions at Leiden University (CWTS), Rathenau Instituut and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (LSTS), where he studies how scientific practices are and have been shaped by techno-economic imaginaries of the energy transition and relations to fossil industries. An adjacent film project with Naïmé Perrette deals with the ways in which hydrogen is reshaping energy, knowledge and land relations.
Naïmé Perrette (she/her) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. She holds a Master in Cinema Animation from ENSAD (Paris) and was resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2014-2015). She uses video, sculpture, installation and image to engage with the role of labor in identity construction and with the way societies map, consider and act on their territories. Her recent film Both Ears to the Ground focused on rupture points between mineral sedimentation, industrial extraction and daily life in an Ural mining town endangered by sinkholes. The collaborative project with Jorrit Smit will inquire about similar dynamics surrounding the hydrogen hype.
Kristiane Fehrs (she/her) is a research assistant at the chair of Micro-Sociology and techno-social Interaction (Institute of Sociology) at Technische Universität Dresden since April 2023. Currently she is developing an ethnographic research project that deals with energy transition and the emergence of hydrogen infrastructures in former brown coal regions in Saxony. She studied at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin (M.A.) and ‘Metropolitan Culture’ (B.A.) at HafenCity University in Hamburg.
“The self-image of Lausitz as an ‘energy region’ is very deeply rooted. This identity is to be preserved even in times of the coal phase-out. Hydrogen technology lends itself to this.”
Hy.land
Electrochemical reconversion encompasses the transformation of electrical into chemical energy, and back. In post-mining regions, reconversion describes the restructuring of the economy after extraction comes to a stop. Industrial sites and landscapes are being reconverted to recreate ecosystems or to become appealing touristic sites. The Cambridge Dictionary notes that reconversion is also the “process in which someone changes back to a religion or belief they previously followed”. Hydrogen reconversions embody the promise of a green reconversion of the Lausitz landscape, culture and economy.
Hydrogen is the first atom in the periodic table, formed in the initial seconds after the Big Bang and the most abundant element in the universe. But in the 21st century’s energy transition on planet Earth molecular hydrogen (H2) is not simple or widely available at all. An engineer at the Zentrum für Energietechnik (ZET) unmasked molecular hydrogen as a ‘highly processed product’ that could only be produced ‘green’ if unimaginable quantities of (land for) renewable energy were available. Compared to the meticulously optimized process of burning lignite, studied in ZET for decades, the scientist could only be disappointed by the current low efficiencies of converting and reconverting electricity into hydrogen into electricity. What to think, then, of industrial and political plans to turn Lusatia into a hydrogen region and preserve its identity as Germany’s (green) powerhouse?
~WET DREAMS~
(on dry Lusatian land)
Today, the Lusatian hydrogen economy exists in the form of infrastructural imaginaries of border-crossing pipelines, under- and overground storage, of yet-to-be-built electrolyzers (in projects like LEAG’s GigaWatt factory) and yet-to-convert end-users (at industrial sites like Schwarze Pumpe). Not-yet-existing and to-be-retrofitted pipelines on countless conflicting maps tell outlandish stories of importing converted solar, wind and water in the shape of hydrogen gas. At the end of these speculative logistic chains energy companies in Europe market ‘green hydrogen futures’.
The multitude of maps convey the illusion that these infrastructures are at the verge of conversion into materiality, and that a green hydrogen future is within reach. An ethnography of these emerging but intangible hydrogen infrastructures follows these speculative narratives as they circulate in industry congresses, policy documents, scientific articles and network meetings. One spends time reading texts, tables and graphs that calculate hydrogen futures and narrate or visualize future energy landscapes. This week our search for hydrogen in situ led us to the Schwarze Pumpe industrial park, where the hydrogen test plant Referenzkraftwerk Lausitz (RefLau) is supposed to be built. Our attempt to localize Lusatian hydrogen futures for now ended at RefLau’s postbox, a stone’s throw from a to-be-phased-out fossil fuel site.
Infrastructural imaginaries consist of spatial storylines, visual representations and quantitative speculations that together demand one ought to believe them to maintain regional energy identities. Hydrogen prophets preach that H2 will save the planet. In Lusatia they promise it will leave local land relations intact and secure the stability of Germany’s industry if only one is willing to take a leap of faith. If only one is willing to invest, massively, in technologies and infrastructures that finally will lead to the conversion of fossil fuel based industrial sites and processes into hydrogen based ones.
Ethnographers, journalists, artists and other interrogators of the techno-scientific-industrial complex play a role in this epos of reconversion. Plans, projects and promises can be tested on what power, land and historical relations they assume, leave intact or change. Leakages in the seemingly bulletproof pipedreams of green capitalist futures can be employed to amplify lost voices, emphasize open-endedness, and explore alternative scenarios.
