Unconventional gas developments and the politics of risk and knowledge in Australia

Abstract

Australia could become the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter by 2021. Especially the unconventional coal seam gas (CSG) reserves in the state of Queensland are developed at an unprecedented scale and pace. This rapid growth has intensified land use competition and, combined with concerns over associated extraction techniques such as hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’), the CSG industry has prompted heated debates about its impacts. In this paper we present findings from our ethnographic fieldwork within Queensland’s gas fields and demonstrate how various actors respond differently to questions of risk and existing levels of knowledge. Highlighting this contingent nature of risk and knowledge, we caution against reductionist scientific understandings that suggest imaginary boundaries between knowledgeable experts and uninformed citizens. Rather, we argue for an anthropological perspective that allows to carefully think through the ways in which contentious subterranean resources such as CSG become known and how risks are socio-politically negotiated. This focus on the underlying politics of risk and knowledge is highly relevant to public debates over unconventional hydrocarbon developments and can address a central issue for the energy production in industrialized societies: the challenges of environmental change and the resulting socio-political negotiations of knowledge in the contemporary ‘risk society’.