New subjects in the politics of energy transition? Reactivating the northern German oil and gas infrastructure

ABSTRACT

The global circulation of the word ‘fracking’ seems to testify to a setback for energy transitions, a nexus that has not yet received much scholarly attention. In light of this, the controversy over fracking is understood as furthering infrastructural changes that are central to energy transitions. Infrastructure should not be understood as materiality per se but instead as sedimented but ultimately discursive elements that can be reactivated and rearticulated. Examining ‘infrastructure’ from the point of view of discourse theory places the focus on infrastructural change. Prior to 2011, the oil and gas infrastructure in northern Germany was largely invisible to the public. The subsequent reassembling of production with fracking facilitated the politicization not just of that term but also of the whole infrastructure. Instead of routinely reproducing the infrastructure, subjects that had formerly dominated the field were confronted with new and heterogeneous voices that challenged their agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy transition
• fracking
• infrastructure
• discourse theory
• subjectivity
• Germany

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions were presented at the 2016 ECPR in Prague as well as the 2016 Conference in Interpretative Policy Analysis in Hull, UK, particularly benefitting from Antonia Graf’s and Michael Böcher’s discussion. Special thanks go to Dirk Nabers and Ulrike Kronfeld-Goherani, who constantly supported the research process, as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their tremendously helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As an exception, Greenpeace organized infrequent campaigns against offshore oil production in the North Sea, most prominently the protest against Brent Spar in 1998. That said, Greenpeace publications on offshore oil also significantly increased after 2010, as a search request on the German website indicated.

2. The Ministry of Economy in Lower Saxony estimated that about 20,000 people work in the oil and gas industry (Landtag of Lower Saxony, 2015b).

3. A similar critique of the regulatory process is also articulated in the United Kingdom (Bomberg, 2017, p. 11).

4. The ban is due to be reviewed in 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Cluster of Excellence ‘Future Ocean’, Kiel.