8/🧵On Teesside, we find that existing industrial materialities and legacies bind the regional vision to blue hydrogen in the near term, while promising an eventual bridge/transition to green hydrogen in the future.

7/🧵We find that the UK’s national energy policy emphasises requirements for substantial hydrogen demand in the future, abstracting the form of future hydrogen systems and maintaining a tactical openness and ambiguity on the technological pathways required to meet this demand.

6/🧵In our paper, we examine emerging imaginaries of hydrogen at the national level of the UK and at the regional level of Teesside, an industrial region in the North East of England heavily shaped by the fossil fuel industry.

5/🧵This raises important questions on how hydrogen futures articulate around existing (fossil-based) assets and infrastructures.

4/🧵Most net-zero policies consider green hydrogen—derived from the electrolysis of water powered by renewable electricity—or a combination of green and blue hydrogen, the latter generated via steam methane reforming of fossil gas, with associated carbon emissions mitigated through CCS technology.

3/🧵The energy carrier is often appraised for its material and technological versatility, able to, in theory, accommodate a wider range of technological pathways for production, transport and consumption.

2/🧵Since the Paris Agreement, hydrogen has (re-)emerged as a central technology in discussions and policies for low-carbon transition.

7/ 🧵 Through this paper, we extend research at the intersection of sociotechnical imaginaries and materialities, demonstrating the generative analytic potential of combining these conceptual approaches.

6/ 🧵 Crucially, in envisioning the UKCS as 'net zero basin', hydrocarbon extraction is sustained into an indeterminate future (rather than extinguished through a managed decline).

5/ 🧵 A key part of the findings explores the recent retooling of the UKCS as a 'net-zero basin'. The imaginary of offshore energy capture is here expanded to accomodate and keep in balance a range of (energy) technologies.

4/ 🧵 Across these different phases we demonstrate how the imaginary takes form around distinct spatio-material qualities of the offshore, in turn linking these qualities in different ways to servicing British society.

3/ 🧵 We present four phases in the evolution of the imaginary of energy capture offshore: economic recovery, market society, energy transition and net-zero basin.

2/🧵 In this paper, we argue that the UKCS has been a long-standing site for (re)imagining national modernisation.