Please join the Department of Geography for the Colloquium Series talk: “Storing the Renewable Energy Transition: Emerging Critical Geographies of Green Hydrogen” with Kelly Kay, Associate Professor in the Geography Department at UCLA.

“Green hydrogen has been touted as “the holy grail of decarbonization” (Scita et al. 2020) due to its perceived versatility and promise as a viable alternative for difficult to decarbonize sectors, including shipping, trucking, aviation, iron and steel, and chemicals. Despite such optimism, many green hydrogen projects have recently failed. This presentation draws on new and ongoing research from Australia and Utah to understand the uneven rollout of green hydrogen technologies, their early successes and failures, and the social and environmental justice dimensions of hydrogen’s current deployments. In particular, in my talk I will focus on three key features of the current conjuncture: hydrogen’s distinct materiality—including what I call its “fuelness,” hydrogen’s reliance on increasingly unstable forms of green state capitalism, and hydrogen’s distinct remaking of hydrosocial relations and the water-energy nexus.”

Kelly Kay is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at UCLA. She completed her PhD in Geography at Clark University, and prior to UCLA, she held positions at the London School of Economics and UC Berkeley. Kelly is a political ecologist who draws heavily from geographical political economy and legal geography, and her work tackles questions of natural resource management and governance in North America. Currently, she is working on a book project looking at the impacts of institutional investment of timberland on rural communities in Georgia and Oregon. She has also begun work on a new research project on the framing of green hydrogen as a renewable energy panacea and the ecological and social impacts of the emergent hydrogen economy in the US and Australia.