Energy Geographies

This week, we will consider energy as an important mediator of human-environment relations. In seeking energy sources, in recovering and using energy, humans necessarily make modifications (big and small) to their environment as well as to themselves. Energy production, distribution, and consumption re-orient human-environment relations as well as human societies. This week, the course looks at the sub-field of energy geography – what it is and what it studies. This week’s readings, on oil and biofuels, problematize two ideas that have become common sense when thinking about energy: first is the idea that scarcity of resources is a result of natural, geological limits; and second, the idea that renewables are beneficial for everyone.

Consider these questions as you go through the material for this week as well as when completing your assignment:

• What are the social, economic, and environmental impacts caused by the energy industry?
• Who invests in renewables, in what part of the world, and why?
• How will the transition towards renewables re-orient the geopolitics of energy, as well as our communities? What will be the role of the state, businesses, and communities?
• Are the discourses around clean energy and climate change taking attention away from the social inequalities inherent in some renewable energy technologies (think large hydroelectric dams and other land intensive renewables)?

Week 8 Checklist

Note: Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.

What is energy geography?

• “The study of energy development, transportation, markets, or use patterns and their determinants from a spatial, regional, or resource management perspective” (Solomon & Pasqualetti, 2004).
• “Geography is central to understanding and addressing the current energy dilemmas. The resource systems of energy production, distribution, and consumption are thoroughly entwined as social–environmental interactions occurring across multiple scales” (Zimmerer, 2011).
• “Energy geographies represent the convergence of concepts and techniques borne out of geography’s core sub-fields to past, prevailing, and future patterns of energy production, distribution, and use at various geographical scales. This includes an emphasis on the material (e.g. biophysical, technological) as well as immaterial (discursive, cultural) spatial dimension of scientific (academic) and policy (applied) imperatives.” (Calvert, 2016).

While energy geography has existed as a sub-field within geography for at least the past three decades, the interest in energy issues has been cyclical, spiking around the time of energy crisis (Solomon & Calvert, 2017). However, with energy taking center stage in regional, national, and international policy and public debates, scholarship in energy geography has seen a resurgence since the mid-2000s (Huber, 2015). Geographers argue that the inter-disciplinary nature of geographical research makes the discipline well-placed to engage with critical question of energy as well as affecting policy.

Calvert (2016) suggests that the approach of geography to energy studies is best thought of as “an academic borderland”, as it lies somewhere in the overlap between the (four) sub-disciplines of geography.

Energy is simultaneously: 

1. a physical entity that is derived from natural processes and transformed through physical systems, and therefore partly the domain of the ‘physical geographer’;
2. a social relation to the extent that physical entities are socially constructed as energy resources through political-economic and cultural processes but also a primary agent in the spatialization of social activities, and therefore partly the domain of the ‘human geographer’;
3. a primary mediator of our relationship with the environment and therefore partly the domain of the ‘nature-society’ or ‘human-environment’ geographer;
4. non-uniform over space and made accessible or not by site-level conditions and therefore partly the domain of the ‘GIScientist’ and ‘cartographer’

What do energy geographers study?

Energy geographers have studied the entire value chain of energy, from fuels and the extraction of energy to its distribution and consumption. A large part of the geographical work on energy has been to highlight the unequal distribution of benefits and costs that emerge from energy systems. Pasqualetti (2011), in his review of books in energy geography, notes the shifts that have occurred in the subjects studied by energy geographers since the 1950s. While in its formative years, energy geography concentrated on the location of resources, regional energy systems and nuclear power; since the 2000s, the focus has moved to climate change, energy justice, energy security, and renewable energy. While oil has been the most studied resource, recent scholarship in energy geography has turned its attention towards renewable sources of energy (solar, wind) as well as non-conventional sources (shale gas, oil sands).

In his review of energy geography, Calvert (2016) concludes that energy geography scholarship includes the description and explanation of:

• the spatio-temporal distribution of energy stocks and flows as well as the geophysical processes which underlie that distribution;
• the relationship between the spatial form of socio-ecological systems and energy availability, production, distribution, and use at various geographic scales;
• national and regional differences in the above, as well as how they are intertwined with inter- and intra-regional distributions of political- economic power and social activities;
• the ways in which energy production and consumption mediates, and is mediated by, spatial politics and the human-environment relationship;
• the co-constitution of energy production and consumption with place-making activities, geographical imaginaries, spatial identities, and spatial representations;
• the geographical dimensions of the political tensions, social injustices, and scientific uncertainties that surround prevailing and future energy resource management decisions;
• the study of place-based solutions to the social, economic, and environmental problems of energy system development including integrated regional supply-demand planning, integrated land-energy planning, and (critical) energy-GIS (p. 119).

Energy Transitions in Geography Research

There is an ongoing global shift in energy sources, from fossil fuels like coal and oil to renewable energy like solar, wind, and hydropower. These shifts are referred to as "Energy Transitions". At the global scale, current transitions are driven by concerns about climate change and environmental sustainability. But energy transitions are highly variable, in Africa poor households have extremely limited energy access, so “energy transitions” can include increased use of energy, as well as a shift from reliance on biomas (wood fuel and charcoal) towards cleaner energy such as gas and electricity for cooking, heating and lighting (Mperejekumana et al. 2024). Energy transitions impact the way energy is produced, distributed, and consumed across different regions with distinct geographical factors influencing the transition process. Energy transitions require major infrastructural requirements (e.g. hydroelectric dams and electric vehicle charging station) and have significant geopolitical Implications (e.g. changes in trade relationships as countries stop importing certain types of energy or start importing minerals for electric vehicles).

Check out: Leslie, E. 2023. "As Projects Decline, the Era of Building Big Dams Draws to a Close" YaleEnvrionment360, April 20th, 2023.

"Experts say the world has hit “peak dams,” which conservationists hail as good news for riverine ecosystems."

As you will read this week, energy transitions are an emerging area of Geographical research and scholarship. Geographical thought, including thinking through the lenses of social-ecological systems, governance and political ecology, is well positioned to help us understand the complexities in trade-offs and needs that occur to humans, ecosystems and planetary boundaries as we navigate these complex transitions. For example, the shift to use of ethanol (from plants) to run our cars is one such shift that has complicated implications across geographical scales (see below). The increasing demand for minerals needed for electric batteries and vehicles is another aspect of these transitions you will explore in this course (FILM: When Elephants Fight, Lesson 9 Reading: Jerez et al. 2021).

Palm Oil as a Biofuel and Deforestation in Indonesia

“Dedicated to the 25 orangutans we lose every day” “Let’s stop palm oil destroying the forest”.

These are the lines with which the Greenpeace video on palm oil deforestation ends. This video, released by the organization on the internet in August 2018, recently made headlines when it was banned from being telecast to UK television screens when it was submitted as a Christmas ad.

Palm oil is extracted from the fruit of the Oil Palm trees. It is an efficient crop and a highly versatile oil, which has resulted in it being used in the manufacture of all sorts of products – from pizza to shampoos; from detergents to diesel. However, palm oil production is a major driver of deforestation and is destroying the habitat of endangered animals like the orangutan. A large part of the palm oil produced is exported to other countries (European Union, China, India, etc.) where it is used for a variety of purposes, including conversion to Biofuel.

In thinking about the geographies of palm oil, consider the following:

Indonesia and Malaysia currently account for 86% of the global palm oil production, and palm oil production is increasingly contributing to the 1.5% annual deforestation rate in these countries (Fargione, Hill, Tilman, Polasky, & Hawthorne, 2008).

The population of orangutans in Borneo has fallen by 80% over the past 75 years as a result of habitat destruction. The Sumatran Orangutan was declared critically endangered in 2016 (Emont, 2017).

The impact of biofuels on climate change is not clear: “Our analyses suggests that biofuels [such as palm oil], if produced on converted land, could, for long periods of time, be much greater net emitters of greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels that they typically replace” (Fargione et al., 2008, p. 1237)

However, the palm oil story is much more complicated. Consider the following:

• Palm oil industry employs 15 million Indonesians (Meidiwaty, 2017).
• Indonesia also protects 106 million acres of forests
• Palm oil is an efficient crop, such that it uses only 5.5% of global land use for cultivation, but produces 33% of global oils and fats (Keller, 2018). Replacing palm oil with other types of oils may require even more farmland.

Read more on Palm Oil here:

• Reading: WWF blog on ’10 things you should know about palm oil’
• Watch: the Iceland store ad banned in the UK
• Reading: Moskvitch, Katia (2018). These are all the problems with Iceland's banned Christmas advert. Wired Magazine.

Knuth, S., Behrsin, I., Levenda, A., & McCarthy, J. (2022). New political ecologies of renewable energy. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(3), 997-1013.

This paper is the introduction to a special collection of scholarship on "Critical Renewabilities". The paper highlights important themes in political ecology of renewable energies found in the papers in the special issue and beyond, these include:

1. Theorizing Renewables-Driven Land Transformations
2. Advancing Industrial Political Ecologies of Renewables
3. Locating Power within Technical and Artifactual Politics
4. Generating Knowledge and Tools for Just Transitions

"The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly just renewable energy transition. This theme issue underlines the many ways in which political ecology is well-positioned to lead critical and engaged scholarship in support of energy/climate justice."

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

This paper makes a case for examining energy transition as a geographical process that invovles the reconfiguration of current patterns and scales of economic and social activity. The authors lay out six concepts are introduced and explained: location, landscape, territoriality, spatial differentiation, scaling, and spatial embeddedness, that can be used to understand the geographical implications of transition to a low-carbon economy.

"Focussing on the UK Government's policy for a low carbon transition, the paper provides a conceptual language with which to describe and assess the geographical implications of a transition towards low carbon energy. Examples illustrate how the geographies of a future low-carbon economy are not yet determined and that a range of divergent – and contending – potential geographical futures are in play."

NOTE: Links to the readings are located in the Week 8 module in Canvas.

Required Film:

Ramsdell, M., Stier, J.D., and Carter, K. (Producers), & Ramsdell, M. (Director). (2015). When Elephants Fight [Documentary]. United States: Under the Hood Productions. 

We're going to conclude this week's topic of governance with the film When Elephants Fight. This film ties together the our previous topics of the Tragedy of the Commons and the Resources Curse in the context of the Congo. The Congo's abundant wealth of natural resources has historically been a source of contention. Exploitation of these resources has funded the fierce conflicts inside the country between the government and rebels, with outside foreign influence also adding to this internal civil war. This film documents country's mineral industry, the increase in the supply relationship with technology manufacturing, and how this has stoked the ongoing war within the country.

The film is available to borrow through Penn State Libraries as a physical copy or as a digital copy through Kanopy using your WebAccess login credentials. This film is also available on iTunes, and Amazon.