Beyond the Petro-State: A View from the Puerto Rican Processing State

Studies of state ties to fossil fuels typically fix on the point of extraction. The expanding ranks of modern "petro-states" has produced an equally extensive scholarly literature on the connections between state power and rent-seeking fossil fuel production. However, the historiographic fixation on extraction–just one dimension of the carbon economy–has meant that scholars have not dedicated sufficient attention to how a wider array of modern states have forged long standing and hard-to-break attachments to fossil fuels. This paper argues that a fuller narrative of the growth of the carbon economy in the age of climate change requires a broader perspective on the ties between modern states and fossil fuels beyond the point of extraction. This paper turns to Puerto Rico in an attempt to expand existing typologies of the state-energy nexus. Not an extractive petro-state, I argue instead that postwar Puerto Rico emerged as a representative "processing state"–a place where downstream petroleum processing became the economic foundation for statist development, poverty eradication, revenue generation, and even foreign policy. From the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials led an industrialization program that turned the island into a showcase of liberal capitalist development. This paper shows that, from its inception, the Puerto Rican developmentalist state grew atop the Puerto Rican processing state; in other words, that statist programs of development and poverty eradication were built atop the economic and material foundation of the petroleum processing sector. This paper tracks the evolving symbiosis between statist economic programs and downstream petroleum processing as a feature of Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Rico's postwar industrialization program. It also considers the processing state's destabilization, collapse, and aftereffects–its fracture in the face of converging energy, neoliberal, and climatic crises, and the residual carbon energy dependencies that persisted after its disappearance.