ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Volatile Biogas: Biotechnopolitics, Activism and Energy Transitions in Perspective

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 2

English Abstract

On 6 May 2025, the European Commission presented the REPowerEU Roadmap, a program aimed at removing Russian oil, gas and nuclear energy imports from EU markets by the end of 2027. This initiative was strongly welcomed by the European Biogas Association (EBA), which was promoting biogas production in rural landscapes to reach 101 bcm by 2040 and 150 bcm by 2050. At the same time, farmers, villagers and activists across Europe are contesting the social, environmental and economic impacts of the biogas plants planned in local and global contexts. This paper seeks to give historical clues that could inform the debate today, by situating these projects in history as biological, social and technopolitical entities.

Biomethanization and anaerobic archaea have been key in the making of life on the Earth for billions of years. Much more recent it has been the production of this gas within the stomachs of animals such as cows. The human-induced mobilization of anaerobic archaea is therefore very new on a geological and biological scale, but is not on a historical scale. This paper draws on an ongoing research delving into four (interconnected) chapters of history of biogas with the aim of unveiling the technopolitics behind the mobilization of anaerobic microorganisms: 1) The first attempts to literally lighting the urban modernization in Great Britain and France at the end of the nineteen century; 2) The deployment of technodreams (and technonightmares) of national autarchy in 1930s Europea, especially in Nazi Germany; 3) The swadeshi ideals of community autonomy and postcolonial independence in rural India from the 1950s onwards; 4) The “green gadgets” that crowded the counter-(scientific)-culture landscapes of the 1970s and early 1980s, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal); special attention will be given to the zones of exchange between activists, academics and young engineers who aimed at developing biogas as “technologies of protest” against nuclear technologies and energy corporations.

The paper will also address the sociotechnical discourses on biogas, paying particular attention to the (historically-rooted and politically-loaded) concepts of waste, innovation, renewable energy and green transitions mobilized by international corporations, institutions and local governments

Author

• Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, iHC-UAB