Decarbonizing the Oil and Gas Industry? Fossil Fuel Expertise and the Politics of Energy Transition

• In Event: 30607 - Climate Change Unfolding: Power, Privilege and Diverse Experiences of Impacts and Responses

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Texas, Utah, Colorado, and Washington D.C. to understand how the oil and gas industry, scientific researchers, and US federal agencies attempt to reconfigure knowledge, infrastructure, and labor towards purported climate goals. Central to the paper is the case of the geothermal energy industry, an economic field which is being rapidly transformed by the arrival of experts and investors from the oil industry. These experts are developing techniques to produce low-carbon energy from subterranean heat using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) techniques on “hot dry rock” in geographies in the US Southwest which traditionally have not had fossil fuel exploration. With these “Enhanced Geothermal Systems,” researchers and entrepreneurs have explicitly formulated a sociotechnical imaginary of “geothermal everywhere” in which subsurface energy production is decoupled from the extraction of hydrocarbons. Practitioners claim these recombinatory experiments address both climate goals and concerns of environmental justice. However, they also pose new environmental risks and have important implications for energy transition pathways far beyond the United States. The article highlights the cultural and political economic contradictions of energy transition solutions coming from within “fossil capital.” I engage environmental sociology with STS laboratory studies, the sociology of work & occupations, and economic sociology traditions in order to give insight into the potential promises and limits of a new energy technology.

Author

• Joshua Silver, The University of Chicago