Geographies of Energy

In his best-selling book The World is Flat (2005), the New York Times columnistTomas Friedman argues that the world is being tied into a singleglobal market place where spatial barriers are being overcome. Friedman,along with other advocates of the “space of flows,” rightly acknowledges theintensified flows of information, capital, labor, resources, and commoditiesin larger quantities and at greater speed. Yet, such accounts of intensifiedflows often interchange globalization with “shrinking world,” “death of distance,”or the “end of geography” altogether, constructing a world unhinderedby the dimensions of space, materiality, or politics –beyond territory.They internalize benefits and accrue them to the city while externalizingcosts, sliding them out of sight, to the periphery, underground, or deserts.This paper asserts the significance of the territorial dimension in the operationof transnational flows. Through the case study of the Trans-ArabianPipeline (Tapline), a cross-border oil pipeline in the Middle East, the paperexplores how the global flow of oil depends on a physical and political inscriptionof the energy regime in the landscape. Throughout the course ofthe twentieth century, the growth of oil into a global commodity has broughtthe Middle East and its oil infrastructure on the agendas of foreign policyand international trade marking the space of the region from extractionfields, through transportation routes and into refineries-ports. Operating between1950 and 1975, the 1,000 mi cross-border Tapline, a subsidiary offour American oil companies, carried part of its sister company’s crude fromthe Aramco wells in Saudi Arabia across Jordan and Syria to a Lebaneseport on the Mediterranean. Designed as on overland shortcut, the pipelinewas represented in company publications as a free-floating pipe that merelyoverlays the land to vanish into the horizon. However, the cross-border flowrequired material interventions that inscribed the infrastructure’s territoryinto the landscape. It comprised an extensive system to map, build, service,inhabit, and secure the line. In Saudi Arabia in particular, Taplineplayed a developmental role in the Northern Province, which contributed tostabilizing the northern frontiers of the Kingdom and supported the settlementwithin its political boundaries of tribes that had seasonally migrated insearch of water across the arid region and into Iraq. The pipeline companydrilled groundwater wells, provided free medical services in its clinics alongthe right-of-way, and built public facilities in the pumping stations towns.The energy infrastructure required thus a set of discursive and materialtechnologies to inscribe the flow of oil into the landscape. In the process,it materialized a territory through which the multinational oil corporation,the state, labor power, as well as local emirs negotiated their stakes andinterests. From this perspective, territory is understood as a constitutivedimension of globalization. At time when the triad of energy, economy, andenvironment is at the forefront of design concerns, such territorial understandingof global infrastructures yields crucial insights into the spatialplanning for subsequent energy transitions.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1