FWF - HydroFRAME - The framing of national hydrogen imaginaries

In the light of the growing pressure to decarbonise our economies, hydrogen is attracting strongly increasing attention from researchers, industry, policy makers and the wider public. Although hydrogen has been described as a promising substitute for fossil fuels already in the 1970s, current enthusiasm about the energy carrier is unprecedented. A rising number of countries are implementing national hydrogen strategies, policies, and policy targets, and large corporations such as Toyota, Bosch, or Siemens present the hydrogen economy as the growth market of the coming decades. In addition, the recent war in the Ukraine strengthens hopes about hydrogen even further. While expectation and attention levels associated with hydrogen are rising, important inconsistencies exist in terms of how the production of hydrogen is envisioned. Casting a glance at already specified national hydrogen strategies shows that nations have very different expectations about the roles that fossil fuels will play in this production process. Germany and the UK are good examples in this regard. Whereas Germany focuses on hydrogen produced from renewable electricity (‘green’ hydrogen), the UK strategy places an additional emphasis on the production of hydrogen from natural gas that is combined with technological approaches that capture and store the resulting CO2 emissions (so-called ‘blue’ hydrogen). In the HydroFRAME project, the examples of Germany and the UK are used to better understand the processes by which nations develop desirable visions of sociotechnical futures. Conceptualizing the future images associated with the German and British hydrogen strategies as politically legitimized ‘imaginaries’, the following questions will be addressed: - What expectations and visions are associated with the emerging hydrogen imaginaries in Germany and the UK, and which framing processes in the policy arena have driven the formation of these imaginaries? - Which alternative or competing hydrogen visions exist in these countries, and what are the country-specific differences? - Which narratives are associated with the countries’ ‘incumbent’ natural gas imaginaries, and how do these narratives relate to the emerging hydrogen imaginaries? - How did the public framing of hydrogen futures in Germany and the UK evolve over time, and what has been the role of these framing processes in shaping the emerging hydrogen imaginaries? By shedding light on how the emerging future images associated with the German and British hydrogen strategies relate to discursive processes, the project gains important insight into the interplay between two different types of expectations: institutionally stabilised, and politically legitimized, expectations on the one hand, and expectations that are shared rhetorically through ‘language in use’ on the other. Furthermore, the project provides a decision basis for countries and regions that currently think about their own hydrogen futures.