The Routledge Research Companion to Energy Geographies

Stefan Bouzarovski, Martin J Pasqualetti, Vanesa Castán Broto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472464194
• eBook ISBN: 9781317043560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Energy has become a central concern of many strands of geographical inquiry, from global climate change to the effects of energy decisions on our lives. However, many aspects of the 'black box' of relationships at the energy-society interface remain unopened, especially in terms of the spatial underpinnings of energy production and consumption within nations, cities and regions. Debates focusing on the location and nature of energy flows frequently fail to consider the multiple geographical networks that illustrate and explain the distribution of fuels and services around the world.

Providing an integrated perspective on the complex interdependencies between energy and geography, The Routledge Research Companion to Energy Geographies offers a timely conceptual framework to study the multiple facets of energy geography, including security, space and place, planning, environmental science, economics and political science. Illustrating how a geographic approach towards energy can aid decision-making pathways in the domains of social justice and environment, this book provides insights that will help move the international community toward greater cooperation, stability, and sustainability.

Part 1
Energy territories and transitions

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Introduction

Stefan Bouzarovski

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The completion of this volume coincides with the Annual Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers — the largest academic gathering of geographers in the United Kingdom. At the conference, the recently established Energy Geographies Research Group is due to sponsor a record number of 24 sessions — on topics as wide ranging as the politics of energy transitions, fuel poverty and nexus thinking. The high number of energy sessions has been a feature of this event for several years, and means that it is possible to attend an energy session in every slot of the conference. It mirrors a situation that can be found at other large geography gatherings, such as the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers as well as the German Geography Congress. The papers presented at these sessions display ever-increasing amounts of conceptual diversity, spatial scope and empirical richness. There is an unprecedented level of international and trans-disciplinary engagement.

The outward facing nature of energy geographies, as well as its desire to develop a coherent conceptual language, was recently reflected in two pivotal articles focusing explicitly on the development of energy geographies as a sub-discipline: Kirby Calvert’s (2015) ‘From “energy geography” to “energy geographies”: Perspectives on a fertile academic borderland’ and Matt Huber’s (2015) ‘Theorizing energy geographies’. Despite offering different approaches to the study of energy geographies, both papers are motivated by the recent expansion of research in this domain, while sharing a common intention to provide a conceptual overview of the field and its future directions. In this, they echo the calls made by a growing tide of contributions by geographers and cognate social scientists (Bridge et al., 2013; Pasqualetti & Brown, 2014; Rohracher & Späth, 2014), who have been arguing that space and place are not only constitutive of energy circulations and formations, but also define the wider political, economic and technical contingencies that matter in this context. With the transition away from conventional fossil fuels redefining the very material nature of, and connections among, locales of energy and production, the need for developing and mainstreaming a geographically sensitive theoretical approach to the study of energy has become all the more pertinent.

Calvert (2015) argues that energy geographies’ position at a number of academic ‘borderlands’ affords the discipline with a degree of flexibility and openness that may prove advantageous in intellectual and practical terms. Nevertheless, he calls for the development of a conceptual roadmap that would illuminate the specific vocabulary that geographers can bring to the debate. At the same time, Huber’s (2015) contribution assumes a more critical tone: he contends that recent interventions in the social sciences and humanities on energy-related topics have paid little attention to the broader theoretical implications that arise in this context. Focusing on electricity in particular, he shows how energy is ‘constitutive of the metabolism of cities’ while producing distinct inequalities and materialities. This leads him to consider — rarely among recent geographical work on energy — the spatialities of energy demand and consumption, via explorations of mobility, the social construction of home, as well as non-residential forms of energy use. His contribution, as a whole, makes important forays into the development of a theoretical framework that is explicitly grounded in political ecology thought while encompassing the entirety of the ‘energy chain’ (Chapman, 1989).

All of these papers reflect a set of concerns that are assuming pivotal importance in the emergent discipline of energy geographies. On the one hand, there is the need for a comprehensive socio-spatial theorization of energy flows and formations, resting on core geographic concepts like place, territory, scale and landscape while speaking to paradigms that have been developed at the boundaries with cognate disciplines — including resources, consumption, assemblage, geopolitics, home and inequality. On the other hand, there is a desire to build upon the conceptual apparatus of human geography while reaching out to wider scientific debates. This reflects the polyvalent nature of the discipline, whose roots combine a variety of insights from different intellectual traditions into comprehensive theoretical frameworks. Energy geographers are thus ideally placed to understand and analyse the entirety of the energy chain — from sites of resource recovery to practices of final consumption — while encompassing the territories and landscapes that energy services necessitate and create.

Chapters in this section

In light of the above, the eight chapters that follow illustrate some of the ways in which energy geographers are engaging with and rethinking key ideas in geography while providing the building blocks for an indigenous conceptual approach to understand the spatialities of energy in society. Even if constraints on space have not allowed us to explore a broader range of energy carriers and geographical spaces, the chapters that ensue have been selected in a manner that both reflects the entirety of the energy chain — from generation to consumption — while exploring a multiplicity of renewable and non-renewable resources. We have also sought to include case study examples from across the world. Collectively, the eight chapters challenge multiple established assumptions about how energy is spatially conditioned, as well as the social, cultural and economic geographies that it creates.

The section commences with Christian Brannstrom and Matthew Fry’s interrogation of Texas’s two parallel energy ‘revolutions’: (i) the potential departure from fossil fuels as the dominant source of the supply mix thanks, principally, to the expansion of electricity production from wind; and (ii) the growth of ‘unconventional’ hydrocarbon extraction via hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. That two contradictory policy developments may take place within a single spatial realm at the same time testifies to the complexity of contemporary energy reconfigurations. The two authors unpack this paradox by asking a number of pertinent questions around the distributional benefits of each ‘revolution’ as well as their attendant infrastructures and politics. Ultimately, however, it is the interaction between an age old geographical concept — scale — and the implementation of energy-relevant legislation that has played a decisive role: by concentrating regulatory authority at the state level, the Texas state government has been able to mould a variety of energy developments and choices. Yet the future reach of any energy transformations is limited by suburban Texans’ energy-intensive lifestyles, the absence of environmental and public health data, as well as the specificities of the state’s political setting.

The enrolment of different types of energy resources in the remaking of energy geographies is a central theme in the chapter by Peter Kedron and Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, who focus on the changing patterns of biofuel production in the United States. Here, the emphasis is on the evolution of the biofuels industry, particularly in relation to technological innovations that have the potential to alter the geographic distribution of economic activity. The two authors demonstrate that the strategies employed by firms in order to enable the shift towards cellulose-based technologies vary widely at the national scale, partly because a single model of industrial development does not exist — thus demonstrating that energy networks shape places and spaces not only through infrastructural or policy links, but also via the exchange of socio-technical expertise and innovation.

Kirby Calvert, Kean Birch and Warren Mabee’s chapter on ‘biomass, bioenergy and emerging bio-economies’ also explores this set of energy resources, by asking a number of questions about the viability of a transition from fossil fuels to biomass, hinging upon institutions, infrastructures and technologies. The authors are particularly interested in the manner in which bioeconomies reconfigure existing socio-spatial relations, landscapes and identities, underlining the central role of the ‘biorefinery’ in driving this type of energy transition, while pointing to the need for novel regional-level analyses as well as systematic conceptual frameworks.

Completing the bloc of chapters focusing on bio-energy resources is Barry Solomon and John Bradley Barnett’s overview of the global geographic distribution of biofuels, which, they argue, is increasingly driven by the movement away from petroleum-based fuel use alongside rural development policies and energy security concerns. The two authors highlight the characteristics of established markets for this resource — particularly the US and Brazil — as well as the entrance of new global players such as China, Argentina, Germany, France and Indonesia. Also of importance in this context is the EU’s role in driving demand for biodiesel and bioethanol.

The ability of energy circulations to forge territorial interdependencies and connections across large-scale geographic realms comes through powerfully in Jessica Graybill’s exploration of Eurasian energy flows. Taking Mackinder’s notion of geographical pivot and heartland as a starting point, she highlights how energy production, transport and consumption patterns both foreground and strengthen the relations among physical, cultural and geopolitical contingencies. Her analysis focuses on three oil and gas regions: the Russian Arctic, Siberia and eastern Kazakhstan. By examining changes in governance, industrial development and transportation networks — as well as issues of geographic imagination and ethnic diversity — she illuminates the ability of distinct Eurasian regions to create extractive energy territories that affect how states are run and people move across space. Despite involving a historical overview, the chapter is also forward looking in its investigation of the possible future of the pivot and heartland identified in the study.

Corey Johnson also examines the flow of hydrocarbon resources — more specifically, natural gas — between Russia and Europe. Displacing the traditional preoccupation of geopolitical research on the supply of energy, his analysis concentrates principally on Europe — in its role as a significant consumer of imported energy resources. He includes a variety of material sites, from households to the planet as a whole, to consider how natural gas moves across national boundaries via pipelines whose construction and functioning provides the connective tissue between different spatial domains. This multi-scalar analysis draws upon insights from planetary urbanization frameworks in emphasizing how recent policy initiatives — such as the European Energy Union — are embedded in wider landscapes of political and economic power.

An explicit theorization of the urban scale as a locus of energy transformations is provided by Sylvy Jaglin and Éric Verdeil, using evidence from Buenos Aires, Delhi, Istanbul and Cape Town, as well as — and to a lesser extent — Sfax in Tunisia and several Turkish cities. Inspired by the shift of governance and power away from the national towards the urban scale, they are primarily interested in the defining features of urban ‘transition pathways’, particularly when it comes to the disputed, undetermined and politicized spatialities of energy-related reconfigurations. Their analysis contests normative and linear understandings of energy transitions, emphasizing instead that economic actors, political elites, civil society groups and other social entities all have divergent motivations and aims in these contexts.

Last but not least, Ralitsa Hiteva’s contribution explicitly develops the institutional contexts through which energy systems are managed and steered, by highlighting the strategic role of intermediary organizations in low carbon transitions. These bodies enable the material flows of energy among sites of production, transmission and distribution, often substituting for activities formerly undertaken by the state. Hiteva illustrates the resulting ‘geographies of energy intermediation’ via case studies of the regulation of natural gas supply in Bulgaria, and the transmission of electricity generated from offshore wind plants in the UK. By exploring a relatively wide set of spatial and resource contexts, she is able to argue that intermediary activities represent a ‘new reality’ in the governance of energy, one that serves to blur the boundaries between private and public interests via multiple trajectories of socio-technical change.

In their entirety, the eight contributions focus on different aspects of energy connectivities — from the ways in which various types of resource use reorganize existing regional inequalities, to the impacts of energy on institutional, geopolitical and urban configurations. Nearly all chapters embed a temporal aspect alongside the explicit focus on spatial transformations: most often this involves low carbon or other types of energy transitions, but there are also references to structural changes in international relations.

References

Bridge, G., Bouzarovski, S., Bradshaw, M., & Eyre, N. (2013). Geographies of energy transition: Space, place and the low-carbon economy. Energy Policy, 53, 331–340.

Calvert, K. (2015). From ‘energy geography’ to ‘energy geographies’. Perspectives on a fertile academic borderland. Progress in Human Geography, 40, 105–125.

Chapman, J. D. (1989). Geography and Energy: Commercial Energy Systems and National Policy. Harlow: Longman.

Huber, M. (2015). Theorizing energy geographies. Geography Compass, 9, 327–338.

Pasqualetti, M. J., & Brown, M. A. (2014). Ancient discipline, modern concern: Geographers in the field of energy and society. Energy Research & Social Science, 1, 122–133.

Rohracher, H., & Späth, P. (2014). The interplay of urban energy policy and socio-technical transitions: The eco-cities of Graz and Freiburg in retrospect. Urban Studies, 51, 1415–1431.

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New geographies of the Texas energy revolution

Christian Brannstrom and Matthew Fry

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Introduction

Texas is pushing the leading edge of two energy revolutions. One represents an important ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Energy territories and transitions
• Part 2 Energy landscapes and the public
• Part 3 Relational perspectives and the politics of energy
• Index