French press coverage of geothermal energy, 2002-2018
Résumé
Deep geothermal energy was first exploited in France in the 1980s in the Paris region. In the 2010s, several high-temperature geothermal projects were launched in Alsace (eastern France) to produce electricity and/or heat. Some of the projects faced opposition from local residents. In this paper, we analyse the rhetoric of geothermal energy published by the French press between 2002 and 2018. This work is part of a more global study on the circulation and appropriation of public representations of deep geothermal energy (European Union’s Horizon 2020 DESTRESS project, grant agreement 691728). Our analysis was based on a corpus of 3 219 articles published by national and Alsatian daily newspapers.
We examine the importance given to certain topics regarding geothermal energy and discuss how this “press agenda” (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007) has helped construct a particular representation of geothermal energy. First, using a quantitative approach, we describe the geothermal events that have attracted media attention, at what moment in time and at what scale. Second, we describe our qualitative analysis of the journalistic discourse by examining to what extent newspapers reporting on geothermal energy and geothermal projects lump together different types of geothermal energy and associated risks. Our conclusions focus on the way the press may facilitate and/or accompany public discussion, and even socio-technical controversies around geothermal projects which have taken place within the Strasbourg Eurometropolis in Alsace since 2014.