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Last month, Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel, Michael Bradshaw, Gavin Bridge, Erika Faigen and I published a new paper, Rethinking Energy Geopolitics: Towards a Geopolitical Economy of Global Energy Transformation. We argue that the two camps which dominate the existing field of energy geopolitics, one ‘neo-classical’ and one ‘renewable’, are constitutively incapable of making sense of transformation. Which is unfortunate, given the reality that it is the global transformation of the energy system under the imperative need of decarbonisation which defines energy geopolitics today. We attempt to offer a corrective.

I want to illustrate the gist of our argument by working through three texts: one representative of the neo-classical approach, another of the renewable camp, and finally a case study from our paper. This will, hopefully, spell out what is at stake in these three perspectives, what it is we are trying to correct, and how.

Neo-classical energy geopolitics

Our first example is a report written for the United States Congress in 1977, ‘Geopolitics of Energy: 1976-2000’. The occasion for the report is the fact that, consequent to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, “control” of “foreign sources of energy” has “passed from the Western countries and the international oil industry to a small group of less developed countries”. What then of the role of ‘geopolitics’ in these circumstances?

It has a certain interpretive remit. “Geopolitics as an approach to the study of international relations stresses the importance of locational factors in influencing relations among nations”, both “as important determinants of government policy and major determinants of the relative power positions of states”. It asks questions like, “Which areas, by dint of their control over which geographical factors” – namely resources, in this context – “will be strategically and economically important in the future? What combinations of states are made likely by these geographical factors?” But this is hitched to a strategic problem, of how “to secure access to additional foreign supply which is essential to the national requirements”, and “to reduce the necessity of access to foreign supply”.

What does it mean in practice “to secure access to additional foreign supply”? It means upholding a common Western front against the global South’s demands for a New International Economic Order; expanding non-OPEC oil production in America’s near abroad, in Venezuela, Mexico and Canada; and acting to prevent the future dependence of Western Europe and Japan on Soviet pipeline gas.

This is, more or less, an application of the classical doctrine of reason of state to the field of energy. It posits the state as a principle for reading reality, and the state as its strategic objective. It is a picture of the world split into discrete sovereign territorial units, competing to improve their relative power by relating all foreign policy back to its impact on the balance of international forces. Above all, this balance pivots upon two axes: the global North and South, and the West and East of the Cold War. The role of ‘energy’ in this analysis is a question of how the distribution of resources conditions cross-border flows of energy – and first and foremost this means ‘oil’ – and how, in turn, this gives rise to relations of dependence and leverage that bear upon interstate power politics.

Geography is more or less equated to the fixed dimensions and attributes of physical geography: chiefly resources, territory, borders, and regions It follows that while geography is a “determinant” of the “international system”, the international system can have no real effect on geography. Causality only goes in one direction.

Renewable energy geopolitics

Our second example is Daniel Scholten’s introduction to an excellent collected volume The Geopolitics of Renewables. “Renewable energy represents a game changer for interstate energy relations”, because “its geographic and technical characteristics are fundamentally different from those of coal, oil, and natural gas”, the first passage of the book reads. The object of this study is the comparison of two “geotechnical ensembles”, or how the technical properties of fossil fuels have imposed a certain geographical shape on international relations, and how renewables will create entirely new spatial constraints and tendencies.

Where, to take one example, fossil fuels can be moved via “many transport modalities (pipelines, tankers, rail, road)” and “are well-suited for long-distance (global) trade” with a “negligible loss of content”, a largely electricity-based global renewable system would observe quite different patterns of circulation. We might speculate that international electricity interconnection will be ubiquitous because, across large distances, the wind is always blowing and the sun is always shining somewhere, allowing for a more efficient matching of surpluses to deficits. But that, “due to the losses of long-distance electricity transport”, interconnection will find an upper limit at the level of regions, leading to bounded “grid communities”. In turn, this would “intensify near abroad and lessen overseas energy relations”, though the wider distribution of wind and solar resources, and the functionally integrated nature of electricity networks, would lead to less asymmetrical trade relations.

What is distinctive about this body of work is its tendency to, first, imagine a “100% renewable energy” world, and second, to identify how the techno-economic properties of that global renewable system will give rise to geographical dynamics constraining the future of world politics. This creates an inferential hierarchy with geography downstream from techno-economics, and politics downstream from geography. It has to focus upon that which is necessary to any fully renewable world – its technical dynamics – in order to ground predictions about its geopolitics.

But this excludes from view the contingent process of political change through which some particular future will be created. This also means that it considers renewables singly, as an achieved global regime, short-circuiting the dynamics of phasing out fossil fuels. While this literature manages to wrest ‘energy geopolitics’ from the neo-classical preoccupation with oil and gas, then, it commits the obverse error. It also betrays a similar (if far more detached) analytic fixation with interstate power politics and cross-border energy flows. It is this which it tries to use techno-economics to predict.

A constructivist alternative

What is our corrective to these two camps? First, we need to allow for the reciprocal interaction of politics, geography and energy, without privileging some of these factors above the others. Everything is not reducible to techno-economics or the imperatives of state power politics. Second, we should neither index our analysis against an atavistic world of fossil fuels, nor jump ahead to speculate about a fully renewable world. We should instead centre the reality of what is before us: a process of global energy transformation defined by the interaction and competition of high-carbon and low-carbon systems, as the former declines, and the latter rises. Third, in order to make sense of how the open interaction of politics, geography and energy will shape this unfolding transformation, we need to assume a constructivist perspective. All that this means is that the ‘global energy system’ is shaped by artificial practices, institutions and beliefs – like property regimes, transport infrastructures, and ways of understanding security – which are themselves formed and reformed through socio-political contestation.

This opens up a wider range of political actors and dynamics than just state power, moving us towards ‘political economy’, and takes us beyond natural geography and a preoccupation with territory, borders and resources, towards an understanding of the ‘social production of space’. We still need to understand the material attributes of energy, of course, but we can only grasp how they are put to work through the coming together of political economy and social geography: geopolitical economy.

Consider, finally, an example drawn from one of the case studies of our paper: the purported role of fossil gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ within the European Union. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the EU has heavily relied on American LNG to fill its shortfall of fossil gas imports. This trans-Atlantic trade is enabled by the material possibility of liquefying fossil gas by supercooling it to -163C, achieving a six-hundred-fold increase in energy density that permits the economical seaborne transport of gas. But this geographical reorientation is an outworking of political economy, first of the build-out of capital-intensive coastal infrastructure to liquefy, ship, regasify and store LNG, and second of the creation of a global spot trade facilitating fast-moving inter-regional arbitrage and price wars. This made it possible for the EU to quickly pull high volumes of LNG to its shores by outbidding rival markets, an uneven re-spatialisation forcing countries like Pakistan and Vietnam to relapse into coal.

In turn, this pivot to LNG reflects intra-EU divisions. Before the crisis, over the terms of trade between Russian pipeline imports and American LNG, crystallised in the debate over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This pitted many eastern member states, the European Commission and the United States, all of whom opposed the project, against Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the pipeline’s corporate backers Engie, Shell, OMV, Wintershell, and Uniper. After the crisis, a division opened up between the bloc-wide response, which set newly ambitious renewable targets in the REPowerEU plan and targeted a 15% fall in gas consumption, and the inchoate efforts of individual member states to expand their LNG import infrastructure. Fossil fuel incumbents have played both side of this struggle. They have promoted the buildout of new fossil gas infrastructure on the premise that it can be repurposed in the future to transit low-carbon hydrogen. And, in the case of the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline that connects Algeria and Morocco to Spain, incumbents have sought to revivify inherited energy geographies, and establish a green hydrogen corridor between North Africa and the European Union, offsetting the need for volatile LNG imports.

It will be this kind of constructed, contingent and conflictual interaction of energy, geography and political economy that will define which of the many permutations of the global energy system transformation will actually take shape before us. Its pace, technology mix, geographies, socio-political form, and so on, will all reflect this messy geopolitical economy.