Narrating infrastructure: The changing value of Europe’s gas grid

Abstract

The future of Europe’s natural gas grid is typically either discussed as an infrastructure soon rendered redundant and stranded or one with an extended role in the energy transition. This paper argues that the grid’s value shifts in response to the narratives with which it is paired. Applying discourse tracing to some 200 policy documents and 49 expert interviews, it develops a five-phase periodisation from the 1980s to the present, reading the grid’s changing value through the energy trilemma—understood as a shared discourse in which actors contest whether competitiveness, security, or sustainability should be foregrounded. The dominant discourses shape the narratives employed by actors to justify the use and value of gas infrastructure, but the case for preserving the grid remained throughout. Narratives helped reconciled objectives that were in tension materially, a case in which is the use of the ‘hydrogen-ready’ narrative to reconcile the contradiction between security and sustainability. Beneath this trilemma discourse ran two interests: the Commission’s pursuit of Europeanisation and infrastructure owners’ defence of asset value against stranding. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, the paper shows that narratives generally accompanied and legitimated the grid’s revaluation, shaping it where institutionalised in instruments such as the EU taxonomy and the 2024 gas package—a dynamic that also served counter-narratives, as the Methane Regulation shows. It thereby extends accounts of assetisation to physical, immovable infrastructure by drawing on a long-run, EU-scale analysis. Speaker: John Szabo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics, CERS-ELTE as well as an Associate Professor at the Department of Global and Development Studies, ELTE. His work focuses on the energy-society nexus, generally interpreting the energy transition as a part of long-term, historical changes. His monograph with Cambridge University Press is slated for publication next year and is titled Europe’s Gas Regime: An Environmental History of the Transition Fuel(s). He was recently an SDG visiting fellow at the University of Toronto prior to which he was a Visiting Fellow at DIW Berlin.