Forest of silicon: Low-carbon energy and green colonialism in French Guiana

Low-carbon energy production is one of the main pillars of the European Union’s energy transition: especially green hydrogen is often represented as the last frontier of low-carbon energy and a silver bullet to slow down the climate crisis. A number of European countries are particularly active in this area. When looked at more closely, though, this vision might be illusory. Like in the case of other low-carbon energy sources, hydrogen production could perpetuate dynamics of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment often emphasized in the political ecology and energy justice literature. In this article, I focus on a project implemented in a territory of Overseas France, namely French Guiana, where, in the late 2010s, French companies conceived plans for a large solar-hydrogen power plant. The Electric Plant of Western Guiana promised to save CO₂ emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guianese. In response, the Indigenous Kali’na communities living in the territories affected by the plant’s project staged a long-term opposition to it, criticizing the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, seen as a form of “eco-colonialism,” and bringing together a varied network of allies. However, the protest could not ultimately stop the project. Based on literature and document analysis, and on fieldwork conducted in French Guiana in September-October 2023, I have examined this socioenvironmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice and political ecology. From the analysis, it emerges that the conflict’s outcome was the result of (a) the colonial vision of Guianese land as a mere economic resource, propounded by the project’s advocates; (b) the French State’s lack of recognition of an Indigenous specificity; and (c) internal fractures across Indigenous communities.