A gap in the Grid: Attempts to establish a Nordic gas grid 1967-1991

Anna Åberg (Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) will present a paper at the Research Seminar “The Boundaries of History”of the Center for Historical Research and the Faculty of History of the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg on May 15^th at 18.00.

Anna Åberg defended her thesis at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in May last year. The title of her book is A gap in the Grid: Attempts to establish a Nordic gas grid 1967-1991,and it traces the numerous attempts to construct a Nordic natural gas grid to fill in the gap in the grid that you can see on the map of the European gas network. Anna specifically studied the negotiations taking place between Sweden  and Finland, the Soviet Union, Denmark, and to some extent Norway and Germany around natural gas imports, as well as followed the development of natural gas actors in Sweden. At the seminar she will summarize her thesis and main results, and discuss some problems and pitfalls she encountered when bringing in infrastructure studies in her research. Further, the thesis is a transnational endeavor in the sense that the goal was to trace processes in the different countries in a symmetrical way. Anna did not fully succeed to do this in the end, and she will also bring up some practical and theoretical problems and possibilities in writing transnational infrastructure history.  

Venue: Saint-Petersburg, Promyshlennaya st., 14 A, office 417

Contact Information: Maria Ukhvatova

E-mail: mukhvatova [AT] hse [DOT] ru