The Element at the End of the World: Chile’s Green Hydrogen Strategy and the Global Energy Transition

Abstract: Chile is positioning itself as a leader in the transition to green energy, particularly through its National Green Hydrogen Strategy, which aims to make Chile one of the world’s leading exporters of carbon-neutral hydrogen for energy and industrial applications. This thesis examines Chile’s green hydrogen policy from a political ecology perspective, in the context of 1) the Chilean state’s conception of green development; 2) hydrogen’s political, economic, and ecological challenges to scale; and 3) the left-wing government’s attempt to implement a socially and environmentally just environmental policy paradigm. By reviewing publicly available documents on Chile’s hydrogen policy, the attempts by investors to implement the policy, and political debates around the scaling up of hydrogen in peripheral regions of the country, this thesis provides an early investigation into a novel political-ecological phenomenon. It finds several contradictions on the ground that will complicate the implementation of the Green Hydrogen Strategy, corresponding to the unreliability of the profit motive as a driver of the ecological transition, domestic core-periphery relations prompting local community resistance, and unrealistic assumptions of rapid scaling.