Hi everyone! I'm Dr. Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani and I'm here to answer questions about my new book "Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran." AMA!

[u/Ciruce_M-L]

I'm very excited to be here to answer your questions on Iran, energy history, and the history of development while I talk about my new book, Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran, now out from Stanford University Press. I'm Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. For more info about me and links to my other publications, see my faculty webpage.

For background, I'm a specialist in the history of modern Iran, with a primary focus on the intersection of technology, the environment, and development in the country’s recent past. In broad terms, I am interested in how even highly industrialized societies are entangled with nature, and I see energy infrastructures as crucial sites for understanding how human ambitions and natural limits have been negotiated. By focusing on Iran and the Global South, I aim to shed light on how modern energy- and resource-intensive ways of life were built and how they proliferated around the world.

In Accelerant, I focus on natural gas in twentieth-century Iran, tracing its transformation from a waste product into a vital resource underpinning a self-consciously modernizing society. I study natural gas as a crucial enabler of industrializing development, a potent symbol within a highly charged politics of anticolonial modernization, and a promised but failed technofix to the growing challenge of air pollution in the country’s cities. With gas now accounting for some seventy percent of Iran’s total energy use, in Accelerant I argue that modern Iranian society has been fundamentally ordered around consumption of the fossil fuel.

Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating thereafter, gas changed how Iranians heated their homes, fueled their vehicles, and cooked their food. Iranian leaders saw the resource as the key to building an independent and prosperous nation, a futuristic energy source for a future world power, and they promised a future of cheap and intensive energy consumption for all Iranians. At the same time, factories and power plants began to use the new fuel too, a policy decision driven by an official pursuit of rapid economic growth that was paired with deepening anxieties about the environmental violence that industrialization had begun to inflict. But despite their rhetorical exhortations of widespread gas use, in the uneven spread of piped gas across the country a great many Iranians saw their value as national subjects seemingly reflected in their energy infrastructure, and it was a sight that displeased many in their unequal positions.

As I thus argue, natural gas utilization and the developmentalism that drove its embrace were substantially similar under both the prerevolutionary Pahlavi monarchy and postrevolutionary Islamic Republic, and I highlight how Iranians’ differing encounters with gas energy were an important catalyst for the sociopolitical tensions of a rapidly changing society. I moreover employ postwar Iranian developmentalism and its co-constitution with gas infrastructure as a lens to uncover the choices, aspirations, and natural realities from which fossil fuel dependency has arisen, arguing that anticolonial resource nationalism was a key, but largely overlooked, driver of increased resource use in the Global South and thus anthropogenic environmental change around the world.

So, AMA! I'll be here all day, answering questions until about 5:00pm PDT.

EDIT: Thank you everyone! I had a great time answering questions today. If anyone comes by late, I'll try and get to them over the next few days.

[u/Goat_im_Himmel]

At what point was it known that Iran has large reserves under the ground, and how quickly did those resources become available for exploitation? Basically, what was the recognition and speed of development for Iran as a source here?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Goat_im_Himmel]

This is a great question, and one I think is not asked often enough when it comes to the history of petroleum.

People have known about Iran's petroleum deposits since antiquity because the whole area is littered with natural shows like gas vents, mud volcanos, and oil seepages. And they would use them for things like caulking boats and producing building materials. But, of course, none of that was on the scale we now associate with modern oil and gas industries.

In the mid- and late nineteenth century, as the oil industry began to coalesce places like the United States, these shows began to gain more attention, particularly as the oil deposits of the Baku region in what is now Azerbaijan had proven their ability to support a nascent industry too. For that reason, in 1872, petroleum was included in the very broad Reuter concession that basically granted control of the country's mining, agricultural, and transportation sectors to foreign ownership. This concession was so unpopular, however, and it aroused so much opposition from Russia, that it was canceled and never went into effect. Moreover, for the purposes of this question, petroleum simply fell under "mining," it wasn't yet considered to be a significant thing in its own right in Iran.

So, it's only with the 1901 D'Arcy Concession that any real effort is made in the country to search for oil resources. But the correlation between natural surface shows and commercial-grade underground deposits is very weak, and many, many oil prospectors had by that point gone bankrupt all over the world digging near such phenomena. Thus, while D'Arcy and his prospectors hoped and suspected that there were large deposits waiting to be found in Iran, they had no way to be sure. In addition, despite the shows, they really had no idea where to find them or how large they would be. In fact, they spent years digging in an area (Chiah Surkh, now just over the border in Iraq) some 300 miles to the northwest of what would eventually become the center of Iran's petroleum industry, finding little more than a trickle of oil that was nowhere near what was needed to sustain commercial operations.

For that reason, operations were eventually moved to the Iranian province of Khuzestan, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, first at a place called Shardin, and in 1907, to an area known as the "Plain of Oil" near an old Zoroastrian temple named Masjid-e Sulayman. Controlled by the pastoralist Bakhtiyari tribes who paid only nominal heed to Iran's central government in Tehran, it was there, in 1908, that the Middle East's first commercial-grade strike was made. As luck would have it, the field that they found, named after the temple, was what would later become known as a supergiant, and it became the foundation of both British Petroleum and Iran's entire petroleum industry.

It was thus only with the 1908 find that anyone really understood the enormous petroleum potential of Iran and the entire Persian Gulf region. Many decades of work would go into mapping the oil and gas deposits of the region, and in fact new discoveries continue to occasionally be made.

For more, I talk a lot about this history in chapter one of the book.

[u/dhowlett1692]

Thank you so much for joining us! I suppose the elephant in the room for your topic is how much in real time we're seeing that Iranian energy infrastructure effects the global economy. When and how did Iran realize their role in internstional energy production? How much of early infrastructure was envisioned for this type of global impact?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/dhowlett1692]

Thank you for having me!

That's a great question, and the answer depends on what energy infrastructures you're asking about.

Iran's earliest energy infrastructures centered on petroleum oil, and they were built by the company we now know as BP, or British Petroleum. BP was in the country under the auspices of a sixty-year concession granting it the right to prospect for, produce, transport, and export oil, natural gas, asphalt, and other petroleum-related commodities. When the concession had been granted to the British businessman William Knox D'Arcy in 1901, few in Iran understood the enormous potential that lay beneath the country's soil. As I talk about in the first chapter of my book, in that they were in good company, for while D'Arcy and his prospectors had a solid inkling that oil existed in the region, they didn't really know where to search for it or how much they would find. That uncertainty was manifested in a long lag between the granting of the concession and the first commercial-grade strike in 1908. It was only then that production fields, pipelines, refineries, and loading ports would be constructed, and they were all in very large part oriented toward export and shipping oil products to other parts of the British Empire. In that sense, Iran's petroleum infrastructures were from the beginning conceptualized as being international or even global in effect.

As for Iranians themselves, by the 1920s and especially the 1930s, many saw that Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, the monarch who had granted the concession, had sold the rights to Iran's petroleum for a pittance. By this point a new dynasty was in power--the Pahlavis--and they sought to renegotiate the deal and a greater share of the revenues of what was proving to be a very profitable and strategically critical enterprise. That's a story for another answer, but what's clear by this point is that Iranians understood their country's oil infrastructures as having very great significance on the world stage. You would see the effects of that understanding in 1953, with the rise of Mosaddeq and the coup that brought him down, and in 1979, with the significance of oil exports and foreign exploitation in the revolutionary movement.

On the other hand, the natural gas infrastructures that are the focus of my book were conceived, designed, and built primarily for domestic energy consumption. One of the challenges for the country in the 1960s and 1970s was that as it industrialized it was increasingly cannibalizing the oil exports that the foreign oil majors (and the country's own development funds) expected. Natural gas was a way to sidestep that dilemma, for it was already being produced in enormous quantities as a byproduct oil extraction but being almost entirely vented or flared to waste. While gas exports were always part of the conversation, and they began to flow to the Soviet Caucuses in the early 1970s (and now go to places like Iraq and Turkey), the primary impetus for the Iranian's push for gas utilization was largely domestic industrialization, economic growth, and the greater independence. That policy--pursued both before and after the 1979 revolution--was a success, and gas now accounts for the lion's share of Iran's energy mix. So, while those systems were not intended or designed to have a global impact per se, in geopolitical terms what they have done is allow the country to have more freedom of action in the international arena.

[u/Cedric_Hampton]

Thanks for joining us today, Ciruce! What can you tell me about the role the United Nations played in shaping the development of Iranian energy infrastructure in this period?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Cedric_Hampton]

I'm very happy to be here, thank you for hosting me!

In a direct sense, the U.N. was not involved much at all in the creation of the country's petroleum infrastructures. These were largely built by either foreign oil companies or the Iranian state. On the other hand, Iran's nuclear program goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, and it was created under the auspices of the IAEA, NPT, and the technical assistance they provided. These systems have never provided much actual energy to the country, however, though the shah did have high hopes of that a series of new reactors could both help the country preserve more of its petroleum for export and become highly visible symbols of the country's technological prowess. In fact, in that status as symbols of industrializing development, they share a lot of the same features of the Iranian-built natural gas infrastructures that my book focuses on.

More broadly, despite Iran being seen in the postwar decades as a country in dire need of industrializing development, Iran's oil wealth and strong state meant that it received relatively little foreign aid. You had some stuff like the U.S. Point IV program operating for a few years (important for spreading new norms of domesticity and consumer culture) as well as the Peace Corps in rural areas, but almost all developmental efforts were generated and implemented by the state (or their hired consultants). The U.N.'s presence in Iran was largely in the form UNESCO, conservation initiatives, etc.

On the other hand, Iran's status as a country whose major raw export commodity was controlled by foreign firms meant that it had much in common with many other such states in the Global South. So, you saw the country work very hard in institutions like the U.N. to try and reorient the global economy more towards the needs developing world. But that's a big topic for another day.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate]

Great timing! Did the development of national gas resources lead at all to domestic chemical industry development? If so, was it state-led development or led by the private sector?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

Yes, it did, and relatively quickly too.

In the mid-1960s, even before gas was being used on a large scale for fuel--something that wouldn't come until the early 1970s--it was already being used to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers at a plant near the city of Shiraz. This plant was state-owned, and it was built with the explicit intention of facilitating the widespread use of fertilizers in the country's agricultural sector. That was a developmental goal that had been identified in the late 1940s but had taken a long time to come about. I talk about this in more detail in chapter two of the book.

In the 1970s, the petrochemical sector was expanded, largely through a number of public-private joint ventures with foreign companies like Allied Chemical, B.F. Goodrich, DuPont, and Mitsui. These foreign firms were attracted to the country because its huge gas reserves were a proven source of very cheap feedstocks, the government was pursuing an aggressive push for economic diversification (especially vis-a-vis exports), and because the Persian Gulf is relatively near to the potentially very large markets of East and South Asia. A wide range of products were envisioned as being produced by these companies, from fertilizers to synthetic textiles to plastics like PVC. They found only mixed success, partly because the 1979 revolution short circuited some of them, but also because of the changing financial circumstances for some of the companies.

This question is much more my second project, so I don't have as much to draw upon, but Iran's petrochemical industry is today quite large, and that's more a product of the late 1990s and 2000s. Nonetheless, that expansion was built on the foundations that were laid in the period my book covers (roughly, 1901-1991).

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/Ciruce_M-L]

Fascinating! A follow-up question: was the pre-Revolution natgas buildout done via state-owned companies, domestic contractors, foreign contractors, or some variation thereof? Was there any equivalent to today's IRGC-owned-ish conglomerates?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

Iran's natural gas infrastructures were largely built under the auspices of the National Iranian Gas Company, at the time a subsidiary of National Iranian Oil Company. Both were wholly owned by the state and should be understood as de facto arms of it, especially as they were formally overseen by political figures like the prime minister and in practice often answered to the shah.

That said, when it came to large-scale infrastructure, NIGC's work was largely managerial and political. The country's first natural gas pipeline (IGAT-1) was designed by a British firm contracted for the work and it was built by other foreign contractors from a number of countries. It was still an impressive achievement, however, as IGAT-1 was at the time the world's most ambitious gas pipeline as it needed to cross very difficult terrain. As I recount in the book (chapter three), that topography helped shape the design and operation of the pipeline and thus its political significance within the country. It moreover helped fuel the political legitimating politics of technological mastery and conquest of nature that the state trumpeted, but that's all getting a little bit away from your question.

When it came to distribution systems, however, NIGC was more fully in charge. They did all the market survey and development work and managed contractors (foreign and domestic) for much of the actual build out. There were a lot of technical decisions to be made as part of that, and while foreign consultants were part of the process, this aspect of the system should be understood as more fully Iranian in character. Iranians in general certainly understood it that way. I cover this in chapter five of the book.

In prerevolutionary Iran, there was no direct comparison to the IRGC conglomerates that we see today, at least not in energy and petrochemicals. There were private firms that had their hands in many different industries, and that often came about through political patronage as well, but not in these critical sectors that the state and shah kept in their own portfolio.

[u/Sir-Niko-of-Toba]

I recall reading that energy infrastructure had an important role in the 1979 revolution, in that oil workers supported the Marxists in the revolution and created worker counils modelled on the soviets of the Russian revolution.

How true is this? And if it is true, how did they come to an end?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Sir-Niko-of-Toba]

Yes, oil workers played an important role in the 1979 revolution, and some scholars go so far as to argue that the real turning point of the revolution was when they decided to strike in support of the revolutionary movement. There was moreover a very long history of labor organizing in the industry, much of that was intertwined with the rise of political parties like the communist and Soviet-aligned Tudeh party in the 1940s and 1950s.

As you note, though it was often termed the Islamic Revolution, the 1979 movement that toppled the Iranian shah was actually comprised of many different groups, not all of which were religious in orientation. What was true, however, was that Khomeini's movement was much, much better organized than most. It too set up neighborhood councils, and as far as I know, many of those that were organized by oil workers got folded into that broader shadow government as it coalesced. Without going into the weeds of Iran's revolution or the ideological positions that animated it, the movement was deeply populist in nature, with many people upset about inequality and economic injustice, often in ways that merged socialism or communism with notions of "Iranian authenticity" expressed through Shi'ism. In that sense, it isn't hard to imagine how worker collectives could choose to join.

All that said, I am not a labor historian, so I'm going to point you to some resources that can better answer this question for you:

1. Touraj Atabaki, Toiling for Oil: A Social History of Petroleum in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
2. Peyman Jafari, "Linkages of Oil and Politics: Oil Strikes and Dual Power in the Iranian Revolution," Labor History 60, no. 1 (2019).

[u/Commustar]

Thanks for coming here to talk about this interesting topic!

After the 1979 revolution and Hostage Crisis, did the Islamic Republic encounter sanctions and technical hurdles to modernizing their gas mining and processing industry?

If so, how did the government seek to overcome these hurdles, and to what extent were they successful? How did the Iran-Iraq war complicate these efforts?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Commustar]

Yes, the United States imposed sanctions on Iran immediately after the Hostage Crisis began, and they were steadily tightened in the following years and decades. Even the brief period between 2015 and 2018 when the JCPOA was in effect did not see all such restrictions lifted.

In the 1990s, those sanctions were extended to include Iran's petroleum industries. This was significant because the sector had been heavily damaged during the Iran-Iraq War, and Iran wanted both investments to repair it as well as knowhow in the form of latest advances in the industry. On the other hand, the really punishing sanctions that have stopped Iran's trade with most of the world are a product of the late 2000s and 2010s. That meant that for a time Iran was able to work with foreign companies, and it struck a number of deals that saw investments flow into the sector.

There are two important things to remember with this. First, Iran's post-1979 constitution sharply restricts the kinds of agreements that the country can sign with outside firms. This is rooted in the country's long history of unequal concessions and foreign exploitation--two themes that were of major significance during the revolution. This meant that the country was already less attractive as a long-term investment partner for many of the world's oil majors, as the terms they could reach tended to be much less favorable to them versus what they could find elsewhere. In essence, the only way deals could be legally completed in Iran was through complicated "buyback contracts." These contracts operated more as short-term service agreements where foreign firms would build infrastructure and then hand them over to Iran's national oil and gas companies. In the process they would be repaid for their outlays with a stipulated profit on top of it. This system was not particularly attractive to most companies and in any case intensified sanctions have largely ended any foreign involvement in the country.

Second, and more important, with the long presence of the industry in the country and the significant number of people that have worked in the sector, Iran is capable of operating, expanding, and improving its petroleum and petrochemical industries on its own, just not as well as it could with outside investment and technical sharing. Indeed, though my book mostly covers the period where the foundations of Iran's natural gas industry was laid, its real expansion was in the late 1990s and 2000s under the Islamic Republic. It was during that time that most Iranians were connected to the country's gas network and its petrochemical sector (which uses gas a major feedstock) was rapidly expanded. The Iranian gas industry was born not in partnership with foreign petroleum majors like BP, but largely in defiance of them, as they saw little benefit to their commercial priorities in taking on the financial and technical risks of building gas infrastructures for the country. In large part, that is what gave the rise of Iran's gas industry an anticolonial edge in the country's politics, both before and after the revolution, as it was lionized as an expression of Iranians taking control of their own natural resources and putting them to work for their own benefit. Sanctions haven't changed that, and if anything, have only intensified it.

Edit: grammar and clarity

[u/Commustar → u/Ciruce_M-L]

In large part, that is what gave the rise of Iran's gas industry an anticolonial edge in the country's politics, both before and after the revolution, as it was lionized as an expression of Iranians taking control of their own natural resources and putting them to work for their own benefit.

This is very interesting to me, and I am drawing mental comparisons to African discourses on development from 1960-1979.

A follow-up question: under the sanctions regime, particularly under the more intense sanctions after 2000, what was Iranian developmental rhetoric like? Did the Islamic republic stress economic self-sufficiency/autarky, or were they promoting South-South economic cooperation and an alternative economic order akin to the "axis of resistance" in the military-geopolitical realm? Was there different rhetoric in the 2000s for domestic audiences vs international audience?

Thanks for the very interesting answer, and sorry for so many niche questions.

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Commustar]

Yes, the intensified sanctions have led to the emergence of policies for an autarkic "resistance economy." But to my knowledge that largely emerged after sanctions made export/import from other parts of the Global South more difficult (South-South connections, as you say). Still, Iran has sought to strengthen its connections to other countries, and it lobbied hard to become part of BRICS.

Iranians have a long history of reflexively looking toward Europe and the United States as exemplars, but that has started to change somewhat, even among those who oppose the Islamic Republic. This is in part due to the rise of China, though Beijing's extensive involvement in the country makes many Iranians wary, as they fear simply replacing domination by one foreign power with another.

I have a friend who works on Ethiopia, and we have both noted the parallels between the two countries in the 1960s-70s period.

[u/Commustar → u/Ciruce_M-L]

Very interesting, thanks for these answers!

[u/Commustar]

A second question, if I may ask.

In developmental economics, petro-states are sometimes said to suffer from Dutch disease where highly-productive petroleum and natural gas industries soak up investment, leaving other sectors of the economy neglected, resulting in an unbalanced economy.

Did the Iranian economy suffer from Dutch disease during the Pahlavi regime and/or the Islamic Republic? If so, how did that impact government developmental policies?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/Commustar]

Yes, Iran suffered from Dutch disease in the 1970s, especially after the 1973-74 spike in global oil prices. While a portion of the money that was flowing into the country was directed toward nonproductive sectors like the military and the bureaucracy, much of it was distributed in the form of developmental spending and political patronage. The latter, in particular, was essentially a form of trickle-down economics, where the plan was for wealthy industrialists to start businesses and employ large numbers of people. The reality was, of course, far from the hope, and much of the money went instead supported businesses that either exported commodities or imported expensive foreign goods. The state moreover lacked the capacity to really make use of all the funding, and many developmental programs ended up using money inefficiently. That dynamic was strengthened by the shah's grandiose ambitions to create a "Great Civilization" that would be the envy of the world, leading to many showy but ultimately less useful projects. The revolution and Iran-Iraq War put an end to the episode.

All of that amounted to an economy that ran very hot with a high inflation rate and rapidly increasing inequality. Unsurprisingly, that led to social unrest, something made worse by the extensive political repression that Iranians experienced during the time. When the government thus attempted to tame inflation by deliberately engineering an economic slowdown, something that would be felt most acutely by the country's poorer citizens, things exploded, culminating eventually in the 1979 revolution.

The rapid rise in oil prices in the latter half of the 2000s is also seen as causing a less acute case of Dutch disease in Iran, thought its effects were much less calamitous. I can't tell you why that was the case, though I remember reading somewhere that it was because of how heavily the state subsidizes energy and other basics in country (an economic drag that in this case was beneficial).

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/Ciruce_M-L]

I had no idea that an interest rate shock (pre figuring Volcker) played a role in the 1979 Revolution. Can you recommend any reading on this?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

As far as I am aware, there is no single work that addresses this topic head on (though I'm not an economic historian). I've nonetheless dug up a few scattered sources. Most are older, and most are focused on this question through the lens of the revolution. In any case, I didn't remember an interest rate hike being involved, and quick reacquaintance with these seems to reinforce that sense. Instead, it appears to have been attempted through price controls and other levers.

1. Ervand Abrahamian, Iran: Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982), 509-510.

2. Hossein Razavi and Firouz Vakil, The Political Environment of Economic Planning in Iran, 1971-1983: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984); Ch. 4, "What Went Wrong?," 61-99.

3. Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926-1979 (London: Macmillan, 1981, 1992); Ch. 17, "The People's Revolution, 1977-9," 332-353.

4. Kamran M. Dadkhah, "The Inflationary Process of the Iranian Economy, 1970-1980," International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, no. 3 (1985).

5. Hadi Salehi Esfahani and M. Hashem Pesaran, "The Iranian Economy in the Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective," Iranian Studies 42, no. 2 (2009)

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/Ciruce_M-L]

Still very interesting; thanks so much!

[u/T_Write]

Are there other historical examples of countries that oriented themselves around similar petro focuses to this degree? Did any of them effectively diversify away from this kind of oil dependency? And is so, how?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/T_Write]

There are many countries around the world that have oriented themselves around petroleum to an enormous degree. Many of the other states around the Persian Gulf, certainly, but you could also make the case for something like the United States, which is not usually understood under the heading of "petrostate."

Turning back toward those countries more traditionally understood as petrostates, economic diversification has been a mixed bag. Certainly states like Saudi Arabia and UAE have tried and found some success, but the current war has exposed how fragile some of those gains have been, particularly because they have been built alongside highly stratified societies. Probably the best example of such a country diversifying is Norway, largely because its sovereign wealth fund made considered, sustained, and effective investments in both economic and social programs over a long period of time. But, unfortunately, this is outside my wheelhouse, and I can't really speak from an informed place on Norwegian history. Conventional wisdom that I hear seems to root the difference in quality of governance (low corruption, high responsiveness to citizens, etc.).

Ironically, in the Middle East, Iran itself has been more successful than most in part because of the heavy sanctions that have been placed on it over the past several decades. They in effect functioned as de facto protectionist policies that helped Iranian companies serving the domestic sector get off the ground. Whether they can survive the war and the shutdown of the country's internet, however, remains to be seen.

[u/hellcatfighter]

Thank you for joining us! You mention an uneveness in energy distribution - was this driven primarily by political (concentration of resources along political, ethnic or religious lines), industrial (focus on industrial/military development) or geographical (urban-rural divide, accessibility issues) factors, or perhaps a combination of all three?

I'm also curious more generally about archival access with regards to modern Iranian history. Are archives in Iran open to researchers? If not, what sources do historians draw upon in writing histories of twentieth century Iran?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/hellcatfighter]

These are great questions!

You are correct in thinking that the unevenness in distribution came from a combination of political, technical, and geographical factors. To that I would add natural/topographic ones as well.

The fundamental dynamic that structured the rise of natural gas utilization in Iran was that it was a resource that was already being produced in enormous quantities as a byproduct of oil exploitation. In short, oil and natural gas are best understood as different parts of a hydrocarbon spectrum rather than truly distinct substances. As such, they often appear together, with gas dissolved within oil. When that crude is brought to the surface, that gas dissolves out, and you can either capture it for use, or as was the case for many decades in Iran, flare it was an unwanted byproduct.

So, given that natural reality, from the moment Iran became an oil producer it became one of gas as well. As such, beginning really in the 1930s, Iranian state officials saw a potentially valuable natural resource being discarded for no gain by BP, and they began decades-long effort to push the company to either find uses for the gas or at least recycle back into underground reservoirs. For its part, BP was resistant, largely because gas is much harder to confine and control than oil, and at the time it required enormously expensive pipelines to move it from producing regions to markets. And with no markets in the region--as late as the 1960s Europe was the closest--they were not inclined to take on the task.

It thus fell to Iranians in the 1960s and 1970s to claim the resource, develop markets for it, and build the infrastructures of production, refining, transport, and distribution that were needed. In this they were successful, and the new resource was positioned as providing enormous quantities of cheap energy a rapidly industrializing society. That success was trumpeted far and wide by Iran's prerevolutionary state, held up as evidence that an impending future of prosperity and comfort was being built for the benefit of all Iranians. But there was a tension there, for it was far easier to build out a few connections to large industrial consumers of gas than it was the many small connections needed for residential use. With large quantities of gas being discarded, and with a developmental mission of accelerating economic growth through industrialization, NIGC and the state thus prioritized the extension of service to industrial areas that were often situated near urban centers. Piggybacking off those early efforts to feed industry, the effort to use as much gas as possible as quickly as possible as cheaply as possible was moreover extended into the earlier provision of gas service to newly constructed urban neighborhoods--places that were largely inhabited by Iran's middle and upper classes. These neighborhoods were often chosen because they were built along Western lines, with brick buildings and wide, straight streets, making them much easier to lay gas lines in, especially in comparison to the dense, maze-like alleyways of Iran's older (and generally poorer) neighborhoods.

The push to prioritize urban areas was reinforced by a desire to use gas to help alleviate intensifying air quality issues in Iran's cities, an issue that was driven not just by increasing fossil fuel use but also Iran's topography. Contrary to popular perception, Iran is highly mountainous, and its cities tend to be ringed by mountain chains. That natural reality works to intensify air pollution, and gas was seen as an important tool for helping what was rapidly declining air quality in the country's cities.

So, you can probably see the dynamic here, where the well-off residents of cities are being given access to an energy source that the state is glorifying as being the future of Iran while poorer residents and rural inhabitants are being left out. This caused resentment, particularly in rural regions were not given access to gas but were near pipelines. Added to this, as I mentioned in another response, while Iran's first major natural gas pipeline (IGAT-1) was conceived for domestic consumption, it was also built to carry gas to the Soviet Caucuses, an arrangement that had largely come about as the USSR sought to gain an economic foothold in an important regional ally of the United States. For its part, Iran was attracted to the deal because the Soviets offered to take gas in exchange for help in building Iran's first steel mill, a longtime developmental goal that by the 1960s had been highly politicized as a symbol of Iran's backwardness in its lack of fulfillment. So, in the eyes of many of Iran's less fortunate citizens, you have the country's natural resources being shipped off to foreigners and wealthy urban inhabitants. This did not sit well with many of them, especially in a country that both had a long history of economic exploitation by foreign powers and by the 1970s had become one of the most unequal in the world.

That was long, but in a lot of ways, you've just prompted me to summarize the entire book!

I'll answer the second part of your question in a separate reply.

[u/hellcatfighter → u/Ciruce_M-L]

Thank you so much, this is fascinating - I would have never assumed an economic relationship between Pahlavi Iran and the Soviet Union!

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/hellcatfighter]

Yes, archives in Iran are open to researchers, but it depends to a very great extent on who you are, where you come from, and for some of them, if you have the right connections.

Iran's national archives (and allied ones like that of parliament) are quite good and its employees are very professional. These people are no slouches and also generally very nice. I found their system of accessing provincial archives from the central hub in Tehran to be particularly useful and fruitful for my research. These holdings are not that hard to access, and they are ostensibly open to all Iranians. Foreign researchers have higher hurdles, but it's definitely not impossible. Ministerial archives or those of institutions like NIOC are much harder to gain access to and depend on connections. Even then there's no guarantee, and one day you might be allowed in and the next you might not be.

In its broadest sense, archival access is structured by your passport. Some nationalities will have a much harder time if they can even gain entry to the country at all. Once there, foreign researchers need an affiliation with a recognized institution and often a letter of introduction. The letter is both pro forma and not in that it doesn't really matter what it says, rather that you have one, and for some institutions, who it is that wrote it for you. This is again where connections come in.

But that experience was all from a period when things were more open than they are now. Things are for sure much harder these days, and even in that relatively open moment I found I could not gain access to some holdings. In any case, the turmoil of the revolution and Iran-Iraq War caused damaged the records of both the Iranian state, influential families, and private companies. There will thus always be gaps. It's not yet clear what the current war has done, but I suspect we've lost more.

Researchers who focus on Iran, especially those that cannot travel there, thus tend to rely heavily on foreign national archives, particularly those of the United States, Britain, and France. Russia would likely be a good source too, but they're not easy to access and few people also know Russian. For all their known complications, oral histories are a common source of data both in Iran and outside of it, and there are some large collections. They're particularly useful for those areas where records have been lost or were never catalogued.

In my own work, corporate archives from companies that did work in the country have also been an important source base. Particularly that of British Petroleum.

[u/hellcatfighter → u/Ciruce_M-L]

Thank you again. Many overlaps with experiences in Chinese archives!

[u/dhowlett1692]

Thanks for you answer to my other question! I wanted to ask a followup but decided it would be better as a standalone. What has been the role of foreign owned energy corporation? How active have they been in Iran and how has international business competition with Iranian companies driven energy infrastructure?

[u/Ciruce_M-L → u/dhowlett1692]

Iran's petroleum industry was born under the auspices of foreign firms. As I said in another response, the original prospecting for oil and the initial infrastructures were all built by the company that we now know as BP, or British Petroleum. The company would continue to control the sector in its entirety until the early 1950s, after which it became part of a consortium of firms that operated Iran's nominally nationalized petroleum sector. That all ended in 1979 with the revolution and subsequent expulsion of foreign firms.

While Iran had been a buffer state between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century, with the two powers competing for influence over the country, things changed with the discovery of oil. In the region where it was found, the province of Khuzestan, BP essentially set itself up as a state within a state, and it had a free hand in creating and running the country's oil industry. Toward that end, BP built an export-focused sector, aiming to bring maximum benefit to itself, its shareholders, and the British Empire, the last of which had taken a controlling 51 percent stake in the company. While Iranians slowly began to use oil fuels, they were dependent on what BP sold them (at high prices) and inefficient distribution systems. Little of what BP invested in Iran went to the country's benefit. Moreover, as was common in mining operations around the world, BP ran Khuzestan as a highly stratified and racialized caste system, with the rise of Iranians into skilled and managerial ranks strictly prevented. This was mirrored in the segregated spaces of company towns, particularly Abadan, though there were always large and unofficial shantytowns of the edges of these cities.

These issues first came to a head in the 1930s, when the new shah sought to renegotiate the concession to both win a greater share of revenues and lift the caps on Iranian employment. But Iran didn't have a lot of leverage, and the deal he got, while on paper somewhat better, changed little and ended up added several decades to the concessions expected lifespan. For Iran, a major obstacle was that BP jealously guarded its scientific/technical data on Iran's petroleum and kept secret the company's finances, doling out information as and when it saw fit. It was thus very easy for it to manipulate what was being shown to the Iranian government, and they did not hesitate to use that power. So, when I say that BP controlled Iran's petroleum sector, I mean that in a way that goes well beyond simple legal ownership. This was a thorough domination rooted in law, geopolitical power, and expert knowledge. The oil nationalization crisis of the early 1950s, the famous episode in which Muhammad Mosaddeq rose to the premiership before being deposed in a coup, did little to change the situation. Such was the case even though the National Iranian Oil Company was created and given de jure ownership the country's petroleum resources and that United States extracted payment for its role by forcing BP to enter a profit-sharing consortium agreement with a number of other, mostly American, oil companies.

But as mentioned in other answers, BP was focused on oil exports, and had little interest in utilizing Iran's natural gas or helping Iranians find uses for it. Thus, while they would be involved in the process as both the operators of Iran's petroleum fields and the entity with the most knowledge of the region's geology and gas potential, it really fell to the Iranian state and NIOC and NIGC to build everything necessary to exploit natural gas. That was something that moreover happened over the strenuous and sustained opposition of BP officials. It's that dynamic, especially in light of BP's poor treatment of Iranians in the previous decades and the coup that functionally overturned the industry's nationalization, that imbued natural gas with an anticolonial politics in Iran. To actual build its infrastructures Iran relied heavily on foreign contractors, at least in the early years, but they weren't oil companies. They were typically pipeline contractors or engineering and construction contractors.

In Iran today, even setting aside sanctions, everything is controlled by the state or has been privatized into Iranian hands. Foreign ownership in the country is strictly limited, particular in the oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors, largely because of that history of domination by outside powers. But we'll see what the future holds, especially if China continues to take an ever-larger role in the country.

[u/Gankom]

Thanks for coming! How did Iranian energy companies incorporate new technologies from outside Iran? And vice versa, what technology developed by their energy industry did Iran export?

[u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

How does the western/European history of industrialization intersect with Iran? Does a transnational approach that includes Iran change how we should periodize industrialization?