ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the notion of the remaking and reorientation of socio-material relations as a starting point to reflect on the early stages of what is being promoted as the UK’s leading industrial decarbonization project. The project will stretch across – and also, beneath – parts of the Welsh county of Flintshire and the English county of Cheshire. Presented as a necessary solution to climate change – and an urgent project – it is framed and supported by narratives of futuring and worldmaking in the ways the proponents claim it will not only reshape and remake a region and its economy, but will lead the way for similar initiatives elsewhere in the UK, in Europe, and globally. The chapter considers one element of this project: discussion about and consultation on the route of a pipeline that will carry CO2 emissions from energy intensive industries to storage in depleted gas reservoirs in the Irish Sea. It discusses how the project is presented as a solution to climate change and how the proponents look to the underground as a space that is essential for worldmaking. Indeed, the underground is integral to the making of a carbon neutral future, in which a buried pipeline will transport the greenhouse gas that is the largest contributor to climate change to a subsea burial ground. In this spatial imaginary, the subsurface is a domain which makes possible the realignment and reordering of the economic activities, industry, and socio-material relations above ground that are necessary so as to enable decarbonization.
