Suchergebnisse

Abstract
As a major source of energy and revenue, "oil" has been rightly seen as a driver of the world's far-reaching twentieth-century social, political, and cultural transformations. But this conceptual abstraction of petroleum as a homogenous substance—lifted to the surface from static reservoirs and shipped around the world—is belied by the compositional heterogeneity of its deposits and the unpredictable dynamism of the buried geographies that hold them. Such factors have had important consequences within the histories of hydrocarbon-rich states like Iran. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian officials sought to build a new industry via the Shahpur Petrochemical Complex, a choice enabled by the unexpected availability of high-sulfur natural gas within the existing spaces of Iran's oil industry, and one that faced opposition from British Petroleum, which operated and largely controlled Iran's oil industry. Using archival and published materials, this article delves beneath the earth to focus on petroleum's sulfur impurities, the uncontrolled transformations of underground petroleum geographies, and the subterranean migrations of natural gas that resulted. It argues that centering notions of uncontrollability and petroleum's multiplicity opens new avenues for studying the histories of developing states like Iran, showing how the spaces opened by uncertainty were politically productive.

AbstractIn the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian officials embraced natural gas as a new energy source for their rapidly industrializing society, seeing it as a readily available substitute for the lucrative oil products their country's citizens were consuming in increasing amounts. Reacting to the growing concentrations of smoke and haze in cities, and unable to alter the mountainous terrain and semiarid climate that intensified them, gas seemingly promised to be a technical savior upon which to build an Iran as environmentally sound as it was prosperous, technologically sophisticated, and energy hungry. Pahlavi-era developmental choices were shaped by officials' concern for deteriorating environmental conditions, the natural factors that compounded the issue, and the interests of private industry. Using archival and published materials collected in Iran, this article focuses on urban air pollution and the fitful efforts to mitigate it through the conversion of industrial facilities to gas.