Analyzing legitimacy discourses in an emerging green hydrogen hub in Brazil

Green hydrogen, an emerging energy carrier that may help achieve national and global decarbonization goals, will reshape energy geographies. States are partnering with firms, offering subsidies and other incentives for developing hubs as agglomerations of green hydrogen producers, off-takers, and exporters, while new and incumbent firms are seeking new accumulation opportunities through the production of green hydrogen. Legitimation processes are key to the implementation and dissemination of new technological systems, but they are not well understood in the context of emerging green hydrogen hubs. We analyze the content of legitimization discourses supporting a green hydrogen hub in Ceará state, northeastern Brazil, seeking to determine the emerging space-making processes. We focus on the cognitive dimension of legitimacy through analysis of ∼ 500 news articles published between 2020 and 2023 in two major media outlets reporting on the proposed green hydrogen hub. The findings describe cognitive legitimation discourses on territorial characteristics, global leadership, breaking from the past, urgency, and essential state action. Legitimation mobilized ideas about landscape, territory, place, scale, and development through normative and technical arguments. Application of the cognitive dimension of legitimation advances economic geographies by highlighting how sub-national organizations represent their territories as adding value for investors, how stakeholders mobilize ideas for de-risking new technologies by overstating benefits and obscuring possible risks to producing states, and how elites justify processes leading to new spatial configurations of low-carbon energy systems.