Subterranean History: Geology and Development in Iran’s Southwest

Deep beneath the plains and mountains of Iran's southwest lay the vast petroleum deposits that have been the energetic and financial foundations upon which a century of state-directed development has been built. Spiderwebbing across the surface of the earth, vast pipeline networks, shipping routes, and lines of communication connected the wellheads that dotted the arid landscape with the rest of Iran and the world, horizontal channels by which petroleum, empire, and disruptive modernization flowed. In contrast to existing literature that has emphasized such links and their political and economic consequences, this paper focuses on the influence of factors rooted in verticality: depth, pressure, and the composition of the petrified layers of the earth's ancient epochs. Far from a uniform medium from which petroleum was extracted, Iran's subterranean environment determined what was possible and profitable, shaping the developmental choices of the country's officials. Oil and gas found in Jurassic-era rocks differed in composition from that found in Eocene layers, variances that reflected the differences in source rocks separated by thousands of feet and hundreds of millions of years of time, as well as the complex migratory patterns of the petroleum through layers that had been fractured, folded, and displaced by long eons of tectonic movement. Through the publications of Iranian petroleum experts and materials from the archives of British Petroleum, this paper uses hydrogen sulfide-a poisonous, corrosive, and flammable gas that appears in varying concentrations in petroleum deposits- as a lens with which to study the influence of Khuzestan province's geologic history on a 1960s-era Iranian project to create a new petrochemical complex along the shores of the Persian Gulf, exploring how deeply Iran's developmental ambitions were rooted in its specific underground geographies and the long passages of time they represented.