Description
Political ecologies of carbon removal are co-produced by scientific and engineering practices, which are in turn affected by the political economy of innovation regimes. How current innovation regimes condition carbon removal development towards particular technical and economic outcomes is not well understood. This paper presents a case study of the ongoing development of pyrolysis plants and the wider biochar value chain in Denmark, which is central to the government’s 2030 climate plan for agriculture. Drawing on interviews, conferences, and published documents, and inspired by recent theory on the role of logistics in the capitalist production of nature, I analyse the development of biochar as a logistical operation. I show how the search for profitable business models leads developers to link existing technologies in ways that reconfigure flows of biomass across the energy, agricultural and waste treatment sectors. Under the Danish state’s innovation regime, which funds private sector biochar development yet fails to plan for financial, infrastructural and legislative conditions that would make it serve explicit socio-economic goals, biochar systems become shaped by attempts to embed them in existing infrastructures, appealing to the speculative possibility of increasing the value of potentially stranded assets such as industrial-scale manure treatment, fossil-fuelled cargo ships and gas pipelines. In this specific political ecology of biochar, the pursuit of narrowly framed mitigation targets depends on a revaluation of fixed capital that reproduces the extractivism inherent to capitalism’s current production of nature.Period | 11 Jun 2024 |
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Event title | POLLEN 24: Towards Just and Plural Futures / Hacia Futoros Plurales y Justos |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Lund, SwedenShow on map |