Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
April 24–25, 2025 | Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
Register↗

Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago

Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
April 24–25, 2025

Register↗

← Conference Overview

Calvin & Freda Redekop Lectures in Environment & Society

Welcome and Opening Remarks by Neil Brenner, Chair of CEGU, The University of Chicago and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Director of the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, The University of Chicago
Moderated by Sachaet Pandey, Ph.D. Candidate in History, The University of Chicago

Thursday, April 24, 2025, 5:00–6:45pm
Room 142, 1155 E. 60th St.

The measurement of reserve volumes of oil and gas is central to the valuation of petroleum companies, the taxes and/or dividends they pay, determinations about output and investment, the production quotas and relative power OPEC member countries wield if the reserves lie beneath their ground, the choice of business partners, and other major business and political decisions.

The measurement happens in two domains, one “scientific” and the other “financial.” In the first, geologists deploy tools and models which ostensibly give a factual reading of the volumes of oil and gas beneath the ground. In the latter, these volumes are then transmuted into value: value of oil today, into the future, its depletion over time, and its predicted usage. Although they can claim a scientific, stable, and reliable basis for their calculations arrived at “objectively” or via consensus rules respectively, both nevertheless rely on a degree of speculation whose unstable and changing process is often cloaked in the supposed verifiability of complex models and/or rules. However, as Donald MacKenzie has written in another context, models act as “engines not cameras.” As engines such models behave in specific ways given political and corporate exigencies.

While I will eventually bring both the geological and accounting elements together, this paper is focused on changes to accounting rules that emerge in response to radical transformations in the political context of oil exploration. By examining dramatic changes in oil accounting rules in the United States after the nationalisation of Middle Eastern oil (the vast majority of which was held by US-based companies descended from Standard Oil), I will show the extent to which such accounting rules—issued or legislated by various government bodies—were intended as lubricants to facilitate the continued processes of capital accumulation for these oil companies despite their loss of access to the physical volumes of oil in the process of nationalisation.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author or editor of seven books including most recently of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020), The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books 2023) and Extractive Capitalism (Profile Books 2025). She is currently researching the afterlives of nationalisation of oil in the late 20^th century.

The premise of this lecture is that we need to reconceive what is meant by “petrostate” in order to better grasp the assemblage of forces organized to reproduce the ecocidal (and not infrequently genocidal) conditions of contemporary petroculture. The petrostate has national manifestations but is not a nation-state scale entity. The petrostate has been from its origins a fundamentally global, or better yet, planetary assemblage. It is not uniform but it is unified through infrastructures, markets and practices. While global, the petrostate also exhibits many localities, in the form of a dense network of nodes spread across the entirety of the Global North and much of the Global South.

The petrostate is not limited to the corporate complex of para-statal and private oil exploration, extraction and processing entities. In other words, the petrostate includes but also exceeds what are conventionally thought of as “oil and gas companies” and their labors. The petrostate incorporates transnational sociomaterial systems like circulatory infrastructure (e.g., tanker ships and pipelines) and extraction zones but also petroepistemic engines like think tanks and media advertising. In addition, the petrostate manifests locally in the social organization of space around automobility—cities built for the convenience of cars—extending down to the level of petrol pumps, and the extravagant fuel-guzzling SUVs that frequent them. It manifests most intimately, in petrochemical derivative compounds and ubiquitous petroplastics that exploit the porosity of homes and bodies. Part of what makes the petrostate so difficult to resist let alone dismantle is that it is sustained by this complex infrastructural metabolism.

In considering the petrostate through the conceptual lens of metabolism I pay attention to petrostate anabolics—the upscaling resource-consuming forces that synthesize petrocultural forms—and petrostate catabolics­—the disruptive forces that release stored energy so that the petrostate can adapt to new situations. As thermodynamics has taught us, metabolism (much like capitalism) maintains order by generating disorder. Finally, I ask what are the xenobiotics—the metabolically useless and potentially damaging foreign forms of life—that could stress the infrastructural metabolism of the petrostate enough to bring about its necessary downfall.

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and co-founder of the field of Energy Humanities. His current research foci include (1) the politics of energy transition and decarbonization, (2) green infrastructure, environmental justice and civil power, and (3) climate adaptation in coastal cities. In addition to serving on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and the Board of Governors of the Rice Sustainability Institute, he co-directs Rice University’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (CFAR) and will direct its forthcoming Social Design Lab (SDL). Working together with Cymene Howe, their design for the world’s first glacier memorial was named a Finalist for a 2020 Beazley Design of the Year Award by the London Design Museum. The same project inspired The Economist to create its first-ever obituary for a non-human. Boyer’s recent research has been supported by NSF, NOAA, the Berggruen Institute, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others. The author of nine books and volumes and more than 100 research articles, Boyer’s latest book is No More Fossils (U Minnesota Press, 2023), an analysis of the fossil gerontocracy that seeks to hold us in its ecocidal grasp and the coming transition from petroculture to electroculture.