THESIS DEFENCE: Naima Kraushaar-Friesen

Naima Kraushaar-Friesen has defended her doctoral thesis titled "Fossilised Futures? (Dis)Embedding imaginaries of offshore oil and gas in the United Kingdom"

On the morning of September 18th, I defended my doctoral thesis titled ‘Fossilised Futures? (Dis)Embedding imaginaries of offshore oil and gas in the United Kingdom’. My work was opposed by the lovely Professor Oluf Langhelle, who was raised (and continues to live) in Stavanger, the ‘oil capital’ of Norway. Oluf brought some insightful parallels with the case of Norway’s transition from (or lack thereof) offshore oil and gas to the constructively critical discussion of my work on offshore oil and gas in context of the United Kingdom.

To mitigate climate change, the world must rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. Yet most countries with remaining reserves plan to sustain or even expand development of their domestic fossil fuel resources, and, at the global scale, the roll-out of renewables has proven insufficient to displace them. This suggests a need to better understand the social dynamics that sustain fossil fuel production, and the processes that bring about their decline or demise, and not merely the roll-out of low-carbon innovation. Recently, social scientists working on energy transitions have drawn on the Science, Technology and Society concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries (STIs) to understand the context-specific meanings and values co-produced with both high- and low-carbon energy resources, technologies, and infrastructures. STIs enables researchers to foreground how, at the heart of energy transitions, lie (often implicit) socially-situated understandings of the 'good life': desirable future forms of social life and order embedded within and enabled by particular energy technology pathways.

In this thesis, I draw on STIs as an interpretive framework to better understand dynamics and processes of transitioning away from fossil fuels. Grounding my analysis in an empirical exploration of offshore oil and gas production in the United Kingdom (UK), I examine how their enduring and contested role in the country's low-carbon energy future is co-produced with diverse perspectives on what constitutes a 'desirable' sociotechnical future. The United Kingdom has been extracting offshore oil and gas from its continental shelf since the 1960s. Around the turn of the century, production of both oil and gas peaked and have since been in protracted decline. At the same time, growing concern to address climate change has driven the country’s energy policy towards decarbonisation objectives. Nonetheless, despite these two-fold concerns, the vast material, symbolic and discursive legacies of offshore oil and gas persist today within visions for the country’s energy future and future economic prosperity, energy security and geopolitical advancement, albeit in evolving and fragmenting ways.

I utilise four conceptual threads from the interpretive framework of STIs: collectives; stages of development; resource and infrastructural materialities of energy; and fabrications and topographies of power. Across three empirical papers and a fourth conceptual paper, I make sense of the durability and potential demise of offshore oil and gas production in the UK while advancing scholarship at the intersection of sociotechnical imaginaries and energy transitions. I first offer a longitudinal analysis of the emergence and embedding of an imaginary of offshore energy capture within British national energy policy, highlighting the evolving role of offshore oil and gas therein and underlining how their durability and stability are sustained. I then focus on the emergence of hydrogen imaginaries, examining how current visions for hydrogen futures are taking shape around incumbent materialities of natural gas assets and infrastructures, potentially delaying their transition. Following this, attention shifts to analysing the efforts of three dissident social movements which have a shared focus on dismantling durable discursive, cultural and institutional commitments to continued production of offshore oil and gas in the UK. Finally, I offer a narrative review of academic literature on sociotechnical imaginaries concerned with energy transitions, examining how power is addressed within it. By making explicit eight distinct yet interconnected and overlaying dimensions of power, I advance the argument that this deepens conceptual understanding of how energy imaginaries are (dis)embedded, thereby enhancing the analytical purchase of STIs for the social study of energy transitions.

The full thesis can be found here: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2088829&dswid=4302