Suchergebnisse

This chapter explores the relationship between geoscientific knowledge production and geopolitical agencies in the making of new subsurface resources, specifically unconventional fossil fuels. Focusing on recent controversies surrounding the assessment of potential shale gas resources in Europe, we analyse the ways in which highly speculative and contested resource estimates have come to inform the geopolitical imagination of many EU states and, in turn, provided a new impetus for geoscientific inventories and exploration of shale formations. In the first part of the chapter, we engage with recent volumetric accounts in political geography and cognate disciplines to conceptualize these epistemic struggles of resource-making as a case of "subterranean geo-politics". The empirical analysis in the second part then traces the geo-politics of shale gas prospecting in Poland and the UK, describing how volumetric projections of resource abundance have become undermined by diverse materialities and socio-political constructions of the subsurface. This is evidenced by the difficulties of translating knowledge across geo-economically disparate sites of resource development, notably the failure to apply the US-based expertise to the European context. Finally, we document more recent efforts by the European Commission and other epistemic authorities to overcome the deficiency and incompatibility of local resource estimates by developing standard, EU-specific geo-metrics for shale energy assessment. ; Fractures in the EU energy future: at the crossroad between security, transition and governance (Formas 2015-00455)

AbstractTo date, social sciences have devoted little attention to the processes of expert knowledge production related to the exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. In this article, we examine an epistemic experiment led by the European Commission, the European Science and Technology Network on Unconventional Hydrocarbon Extraction, which was aimed at producing authoritative knowledge claims on shale energy development. By developing the idiom of 'co-production', the article provides a more fine-grained understanding of the processes through which competing knowledge claims, forms of epistemic authority, and new energy publics co-evolve in a situation of highly-politicized controversy. Drawing on our first-hand observations as participants representing the social sciences in the expert network, this article provides an in-depth ethnographic account of the struggles of the European Union authorities to manage and delimit the controversy. In this way, the analysis develops our understanding of the challenges in improving the deliberation of shale gas as a transnational energy policy issue.