Anticipating Green Hydrogen Futures: Exploring the Sociomaterial Production of a Green Fuel

This paper examines the enactment of green hydrogen futures in Chilean Patagonia.
Complementing the literature on socio-technical imaginaries, we explore the role of
anticipatory practices as a key operation by which certain energy futures and technological
interventions around green hydrogen (GH2) materialize, while other alternatives are
discarded. We explore how through these socio-material practices the value of this new fuel
is staged and dramatized. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and secondary
material, we empirically study two energy anticipation practices of green hydrogen futures:
GH2 technology fairs, and GH2 project prototypes and demonstrations. While the former
materialize atmospheres of imminence and business opportunity where technological
innovations, economic opportunities and public policies are realized in the present, the latter
work as socio-material interventions that enable the value of this new fuel to materialize for
different audiences. The article highlights three critical aspects of these anticipatory
practices: the socio-material and situated dimension, the spectacle and representation of
value, and the type of energy politics they entail for producing hydrogen futures. We conclude
by discussing theoretical insights around the central role of materialities and practices for
enacting specific forms of techno-optimist energy futures.