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Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani, "Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran" (Stanford UP, 2026)
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
welcome to the New Books Network.
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Filippo de Chirico
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of New Books Network. My name is Filippo de Chirico and I'm your host. Today. I'm very happy to talk to Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani, who is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. And we'll be talking about his new book, Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Cyrus welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Thank you for having me.
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Filippo de Chirico
So there are a few reasons why I'm excited to discuss this book with you. The first one is that it is incredibly timely and this time is not a cliche. The topic of Iran and energy has been the story of the last few months. On one hand, the nuclear program and on the other the blockade of Hormuz and the disruption of global oil and LNG markets. So we are recording this on June 18, just a few hours after President Trump signed a memorandum in Versailles, of all places, for a ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. So against this backdrop, we're going to talk about the history of the Iranian energy system. And we will be focusing on the main component of Iran's domestic energy system, which is natural gas, which composes a whopping 72% of the primary energy mix, according to the International Energy Agency. And here comes the second reason why I'm happy to have this conversation. Natural gas is the neglected stepchild of energy history. Whole libraries have been written about oil, electricity, nuclear power. For some reason, there are not many history books on this energy source yet. As someone who's writing a PhD dissertation on the history of natural gas in Italy, I'm really inspired by your work and grateful for you to be here. But before we delve into the nitty gritty of geology, pipelines, grids, could you tell us something about yourself and how you came to write this book?
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Thank you very much again for having me. I appreciate that you find this book so timely and useful for your own work. I think that's the dream of, or I should say maybe the hope of every academic that we're not just writing for ourselves. So thank you. This book comes out of a, you could say a marriage of my professional interests, my personal interests, and my familial background. For those who are potentially familiar with Iranian names and culture, they won't be surprised to know that I am partially of Iranian descent. And when I entered my PhD program, I was in the history department. I was very much interested in what we might call science and technology studies questions, right, questions of those types. I was very interested in how at the time I termed modern Iranian society was shaped by new technologies, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. I didn't quite know what I wanted to focus on. And so one fall afternoon when I was writing, starting the process of writing my dissertation prospectus, I talked to my father. My father grew up in Iran and he was born in the 1950s, grew up there in the 60s and the 70s. And I asked him, what device or piece of technology do you remember changing your life the most? And I thought he would say, oh, you know, automobiles or perhaps television or, you know, air travel or something along those lines is what I expected. But his answer very much surprised me when he said, I remember when your grandmother got a gas stove for the house because prior to that she had been cooking primarily in the courtyard, and when she got a gas stove, it brought cooking inside the home, and then he could use the courtyard to play football, right? So this was his childhood memory of kind of the most transformative thing in his life. And, you know, that got me thinking about how people's lives are shaped around these small technological moments. And of course, the book, as you've read, Filippo, kind of in some ways moves away from that very micro history. Right, right. Because as I studied the question of what does it actually take to make a gas stove to be a useful appliance? It was a question that just progressively unfolded to include, essentially, you could say, the entirety of a developing society, an industrializing society. And then of course, as you mentioned, geology, topography, the chemical compositions of gas reserves. Right. All of those things were topics that emerged out of the sources. And those very much, I would say, connected with, and I'll end on this, my kind of personal interests in, you could say, environmental questions which had kind of long, kind of lurked in the background of my professional work.
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Filippo de Chirico
And I'm actually quite curious about the title because it's in a sense unusual, maybe, but perhaps. But I feel that there's a great story behind it. Yeah.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
The title was actually set very, very, very late in the process. The editor at Stanford University Press and I actually went back and forth quite
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Commercial Announcer 1
a bit over it.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
I had a lot of trouble figuring out a title. It is, in some ways Accelerant is a play on the idea of the Great acceleration, which is J.R. mcNeil's idea of the post World War II takeoff of human population, resource consumption, energy use and of course, carbon emissions. The title is a play on that, in the sense of Natural gas was the accelerant of Iranian industrialization. And the subtitle Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World and Making Modern Iran. We went back and forth again about whether natural gas should appear in the title. And I ultimately decided, as I make, as I argue, I think extensively in the book, and I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's convincingly is that you can't actually really consider natural gas and oil to be separate. Right. They are two things that are so deeply intertwined in a both physical sense, but also in a. In a technological, social, infrastructural sense, economic, political, that it made more sense to me to emphasize the idea of energy as a foundation for an industrializing, a self consciously industrializing society, as I talk about it.
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Interviewer/Host 2
Great.
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Filippo de Chirico
So let's go back to the beginning of this process and let's talk about when natural gas is found, who finds it and how they perceive it. How is it perceived and what are the main ideas around it.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Yeah, that's a great question. And this from the beginning, as I just alluded to this is A question that very much is intertwined with the issue of oil or petroleum.
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Commercial Announcer 4
Oil.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Oil was found first in Iran in 1908. It was a concession that the Iranian government, the Qajar dynasty, granted to a British businessman by the name of William Knox d'. Arcy. I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with this history, and that is a story that I think has been told many times. But often what is overlooked in that story is the fact that at the very moment that Iran became a producer of oil, it also became a producer of natural gas. And that is a product of the geological circumstances within which these two substances are found, or as I argue, within which the spectrum of hydrocarbons of which these two things are both constituent parts of, appear in nature. And. And Iranian oil wells, like many oil wells around the world, have significant, what is called gas drive, which is the pressure differentials between the underground reservoirs is what pushes the oil up the well. Right? You can do this in many ways, but many natural fields have gas drive, which is that the gas that is dissolved within the petroleum when the well is or when the reservoir is tapped is what forces the oil up the well. Over time, that dissipates. And you can do things like inject water or new gas to kind of artificially boost it, but that's the same idea. And so when you see those old Images in the 19th century, early 20th century, where great geysers of oil are being launched into the sky and, you know, falling onto the workers, that is often the product of the force with which natural gas is driving the oil up the well, which of course means that the natural gas is coming up from underground as well. And that is what prospectors in Iran said. They said when oil came to the surface, they were enveloped by kind of a suffocating stench of hydrogen sulfide, what we would call what we often experience more readily as rotten chicken eggs.
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Filippo de Chirico
Right?
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
So that's an interesting moment, or that's an interesting thing to realize because. Because I think natural gas is typically considered to be a Post World War II phenomenon, right. Perhaps even later.
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Commercial Announcer 5
Right.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Or the 70s, 80s, or even the 21st century. But really, gas has been produced since the oil industry was born. But the issue with it, and this goes to the second part of your question, is that the chemical compositions of. Of oil and natural gas make their utility very, very different to humans, right? We have a very anthropocentric view of these two substances. Natural gas, for those who don't know, is primarily composed of methane, which is the lightest hydrocarbon, ethane, propane and butane, right? Those are the primary constituents. And methane is by far the largest. What we call petroleum. Oil is often much heavier. Hydrocarbons, right? Sometimes all the way up to molecules that have 40, 50, 60 carbon atoms. The difference, for the sake of this story, at least at this moment, is that at the Earth's surface, under one atmosphere of pressure, the hydrocarbons that constitute natural gas are gas, right? They, they dissolve into the air, they float away, they're very difficult to corral and control. Oil, on the other hand, these hydrocarbons are typically liquid, sometimes even solids, if they're asphaltics, right? And you can literally put that into barrels and strap them onto trucks, donkeys, ships, whatever you want and ship them. So oil is much easier for people to handle. And that is a big part of the reason why, at this moment in the early 20th century in Iran, when oil was found, the oil had value, commercial value, utility, and the natural gas primarily did not. And so it was not just ignored, it was in some ways even an impediment, because it can be corrosive, it can be suffocating, it can be toxic, and in that sense, it was valueless. There was no market for it because it took. It would take an enormous amount of investment to be able to essentially confine natural gas in useful quantities and be able to transport it to places where it could be usefully employed.
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Filippo de Chirico
So what are the first actual uses for natural gas in Iran? At first it's discarded. I guess it's flared or.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Correct, yes, almost. For decades, almost all the gas and the gas that we're talking about at this moment in Iran is what is termed associated natural gas, which is gas that is found alongside oil. And there are very, very few oil reserves in the world that do not have significant gas dissolved within it. The reverse is not true. There are gas reserves or gas deposits that don't have significant amounts of oil. But at this moment, we're talking about what is called associated gas. And the vast majority of it, 90 some percent for decades, was flared or vented into the atmosphere.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Let's go.
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Commercial Announcer 6
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Interviewer/Host 2
Whoa.
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Commercial Announcer 7
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
This might be the drink of the summer.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
I'm rocking with it.
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Filippo de Chirico
As you were saying, natural gas has many limits, but it's also quite versatile. Once you can harness it so you can use it for heating, you can turn it into electricity, you can use it as feedstock to synthesize fertilizers or plastics. Who had the idea first of using it for. For something useful? And what were the first uses of natural gas?
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
That's a great question. And it is, I think, the kind of the moment where you start to see some of the politics of development and energy and petroleum and natural gas begin to emerge in Iran. So the concession that found oil in 1908 became what we now call BP, or British Petroleum. It has had various names over the years. I'm just going to call it BP for the sake of simplicity here. BP, over the course of the 1910s, 20s, 30s, used minor amounts of natural gas within their own operations because they knew fully well that you could burn natural gas. You could. You could use it to spike particular oil products. Right. These were not set technologies. Right. These were things that were developed over the course of this time period as they learned to use natural gas. But the main challenge remained the fact that they could use it because their use for it was already in place. Right. Iran's oil fields were found in a region of the country that is on the. You know, at the time, you might say it was a backwater. Right. There are no major significant populations. There's no cities, there's no industry. Right. Except, of course, for oil, except for BP's own facilities. So they used limited amounts of natural gas and their own things and just discarded the rest. The Iranian government, roughly, I would say, beginning in the 1930s, started to become conscious of the fact that natural gas did have significant potential utility. And at this moment in time, in the United States, natural gas is actually being injected into pipelines and being transported across the country for use. This had actually gone back into the 19th century, but it was then primarily a local or regional affair. But by the 1930s you actually do start seeing major pipelines being constructed between places like West Texas and Chicago or other midwestern cities with major industrial sectors. So they're conscious of this and they start, Iranian officials begin to put pressure on BP to essentially do something with the natural gas that they're producing. Or in the beginning, in many ways it started in the form of why are you venting it, why aren't you re injecting it? Right. This is also something with President, sorry, precedent. As in the United States, various laws were in place that governed the use of so called sweet gas or gas that had, or sorry, oil wells that had significant quantities of valuable natural gas. And so they begin to apply pressure. Why are you wasting this valuable natural resource of ours? This can be quite useful to us, perhaps not today, but in the future. And this becomes, as I argue in the first chapter, this idea of whether natural gas has value is the underlying substrate of debates over gas use until roughly, you could say the late 1960s, early 1970s, when even BP at that point finally, finally gives up the idea that gas doesn't have enough commercial value to be worth doing something about. But in the 30s and the 40s, right, BP is, is resisting the idea of the construction of either very expensive pipelines or very expensive reinjection programs, which is, as I alluded to earlier, when you re inject natural gas into oil wells to preserve it, they don't want to do that. Both are potentially very expensive. And so they look for various alternative, alternative uses for the substance. And it was quickly hit upon that if the primary challenge of natural gas, of using natural gas is that it is so volatile that it is difficult to corral and control, then what happens if we change it into a different form? Right. Today we might say liquefied natural gas, LNG. But at that time, 30s, 40s, that technology didn't really exist. I believe it was first developed in the 60s, but it wasn't viable commercially for a long time. The technology just wasn't there. But what you can do is you can use gas to do things like create petrochemicals. And so this became some of the earliest uses. And in fact, except for some experimental stuff and using gas directly as energy, that never really took off. In the 50s, Iran's primary use, first use of natural gas was in the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers. Iran, like many agrarian societies, that's what it was at this point in the 50s and the 60s had a tremendous potential need for natural gas or sorry for fertilizers, and they were relatively expensive to import for what was at the time a relatively poor country. There was a wave of land reform and attempted commercial reforms within the agricultural sector. Mechanization didn't really take off. There's all the kinds of reasons for this, but the one thing that really took hold was the use of synthetic fertilizers. In large part because a, a plot of any size can benefit from fertilizer use, right? You have, you have, you have a container garden on your patio, right? And you can still make use of fertilizer in it, right? It's different. You're not going to buy a tractor for a small plot of land, but you can use fertilizers. And so there's a enormous potential demand in market for fertilizers. And what happens is you can take natural gas and you can build a relatively small pipeline, right? Could be a few dozen miles, can be maybe 100 miles, whatever it is. But when you create natural gas or fertilizers, you transform the natural gas into something like liquid or pellets or powder that at that point you can then put in barrels or boxes or whatever and transport just like you would oil. And so that became essentially the original use of natural gas. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the Iranian government and by the 50s and 60s it is engaged in a very overt top down effort of national development, economic development, this is an enormous boon or boost for the agricultural sector, but it doesn't actually use that much natural gas. And so the majority is still being flared at this point.
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Interviewer/Host 2
As you mentioned, the main problem with natural gas is that you have to transport it to use it. And doing so is not easy and requires a lot of infrastructure. And the main producing region is in the southwest of the country, while potential markets are in the cities like Tehran and Isfahan and Chiraz, which are in the center and the north of the country. So what are the main infrastructural projects to bring gas to the cities?
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Commercial Announcer 7
Right.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
So that's essentially the next step. So I would say by the early to mid-1960s, Iranian officials essentially decide that BP is never going to build a pipeline. Right. As I talk about in the second chapter, there are all kinds of proposals to build pipelines to transport natural gas to Western Europe, which is really the closest major market. And they're infeasible for many reasons. Political, not so much technical, mostly political. You could say commercial, economic. And so Iranian officials decide, well, if we want to make use of this.
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Commercial Announcer 7
Right.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Then we need to do it ourselves. And this is driven essentially by that realization combined with the country's accelerating industrialization.
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Filippo de Chirico
Right?
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
So the development programs that the Iranian government is pursuing are in large part paid for by the revenues that they are receiving for oil exports. Right? So BP extracts oil, refines it, ships it abroad, and remits a certain amount of money.
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Commercial Announcer 7
Not enough.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
There's always disputes, Right. But whatever it is, as Iran begins to industrialize in the 1950s and 1960s, it needs more and more energy, Right. And that begins to threaten the actual oil exports. Right. And so the. There's this tension here, right? We need to use oil internally, domestically, to power our own industrialization, which is a primary national goal set from the very top of the government and society. But we also need to sell it. And also, BP doesn't want to reduce the amount that it is shipping abroad. Right? It's making a lot of money. Its whole purpose is to do that. And it still, at this point can practically controls Iran's oil industry in 53. It's technically nationalized, but, you know, that's a, that's a story probably people are familiar with. And I'm just gonna.
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Filippo de Chirico
With Mossadegh.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Yeah. And so they realize that perhaps the solution to this tension is actually natural gas. Because you can't easily ship natural gas abroad. So it's being flared, Right. You can use little bits for petrochemicals, which they're starting to. So it's essentially almost a free resource. Right. That is going to no use. The problem is, as you said, that most of Iran's gas is being extracted in the southwest of the country, the south southwest of the country. And most its largest cities and most industrialized areas, particularly the capital, Tehran, are in the central and northern parts of the country. And so the question becomes, how do we bridge this gap? And of course, the answer is a pipeline. And so the Iranian officials essentially decide that we are going to not only build a pipeline, we are also going to develop markets for natural gas domestically. Right? And this is an important moment in the idea of or in the symbolism or the place that natural gas takes in Iranian politics and society. Because this, as you mentioned, Mossadegh, 53, tries to nationalize Iran's oil industry, succeeds in a de jure sense, but fails completely in a de facto sense. And so this moment becomes. This is pre revolutionary Iran. I think this is important to recognize. This is pre revolutionary Iran. This is the monarchy. This is the monarchy that everyone sees as being allied to western Powers. It's in the Western camp of the United States, in Great Great Britain. These officials, the Shah himself, even decide this is our opportunity to assert our own developmental prowess, right? Our own ability to develop our own society. And so natural gas takes on what I argue is strong anti colonial valences, right? I think this is something that is not recognized about the Pahlavi era or the monarchical era, is that the politics of anti colonialism were active in the country at the time and were actually pretty strong. You might say there's an accommodationist impulse as opposed to a revolutionary impulse that'll come later, as most people know. But nonetheless, a natural gas is positioned. This ability or this desire to build a pipeline, build markets and develop Iran's industry and society using our own natural resources and our own kind of intellect and ability takes on very, very strong anti colonial politics. And this is what they do essentially in the course of the 1960s or over the course of the 1960s, they design a pipeline, the first Iran gas trunk line that would run from the south southwest of the country through the central region to Tehran and it would deliver huge quantities of natural gas to these cities. It was a very challenging pipeline to build. Most people don't appreciate that Iran is a highly mountainous country, right? It's not like Iraq, its next door neighbor, which is mostly plains and deserts. Iran is highly mountainous and the mountains are, are quite tall, right? They're comparable to the Alps or the Rockies or not quite the Himalayas, but they are significant. So this is the plan. And into this moment steps the Soviet Union, actually. So there were tensions between Iran and countries like the United States and governments of countries like the United States and Great Britain over the course of the country's development and the extent to which Iran should seek to develop itself broadly or whether it should focus on its comparative advantages. And this was manifested in a highly politically charged question over whether Iran should build a steel mill. And for years the IMF and the World bank and American financiers had refused to lend money over this, right? They said, you don't need a steel plant. Everybody makes steel, just buy steel. And Iranians like, no, no, no, we can't be a properly industrialized nation. We can't be a properly modern nation unless we can build our own, unless we can produce our own steel. Turkey has a steel mill, Egypt has a steel mill, India has a steel mill, Pakistan has a steel mill. Why can't we have a steel steel mill? And so into this the Soviet Union steps and they say, okay, we will fund Your steel mill. And in payment, we will take not hard currency, which Iran had limited reserves of, but we will take natural gas. The Soviet Union doesn't really need natural gas. Right. Iran has the world's second largest reserves of natural gas, and the number one is Russia today. Right. Or at the time, the Soviet Union. They don't really need natural gas. It saves them the need to build a pipeline from the Urals or the caucuses. But that's not. I mean, the Soviet Union is a master at building huge industrial projects. That's not that big a deal. This is a moment that the Soviet leadership saw. Oh, okay. We can gain an economic foothold in a country that is in the American camp. Right. That's kind of the. A longer story made short. And so what happens is that the pipeline is modified, expanded, and extended to not only carry natural gas to cities like Esfahan, Tehran and Shiraz, but also the Soviet caucuses. And so over the course of the second half of the 1960s, with Soviet help, but also extensive involvement of Western contractors. Right. A pipeline is built from the region that we call Khuzestan, the province of Khuzestan in the southwest, across essentially two mountain trains, a bunch of rivers to carry gas to the cities and the Soviet border. And it succeeds. And by the early 1970s, pipe or gas is actually flowing through this pipeline, and it is a significant success for the country, and it's a highly symbolic success. Right. This is something that is trumpeted by the Iranian government as. Look at this technologically sophisticated, enormous, extremely modern, toughest pipeline in the world. Look at what we have done. Ignore the fact that we got help from foreign contractors, but this was our Iranian accomplishment.
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Filippo de Chirico
So in the 1950s and 60s, Iran
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Interviewer/Host 2
goes through a time of fast industrialization, and that means necessarily a lot of pollution, especially in urban areas.
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Filippo de Chirico
I wonder if you could tell us
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Interviewer/Host 2
something about the role of natural gas in dealing with pollution.
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Filippo de Chirico
And since I also think this is one of the most interesting and beautifully
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Interviewer/Host 2
written part of the book, I was
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Filippo de Chirico
wondering if you could tell us something
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Interviewer/Host 2
about the sources and the methodology you used.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Sure, yeah. That was one of the most interesting and kind of fascinating aspects that I found when I was researching this story. So just to kind of set the stage, natural gas, of course, as I just talked about, promised a future of very bountiful and very cheap energy. Right. But as you mentioned, over the 50s, 60s and 1970s, as Iran industrialized, and that, of course, means factories, but also motor vehicles and home home energy use, air pollution becomes a significant issue in the. In the country's cities, particularly its capital, Tehran. For those who don't know Tehran, Tehran can be compared to Los Angeles, where I live, or something like Mexico City,
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Commercial Announcer 1
where
- [35:14]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
the city is ringed by mountains and thus intensifies air pollution. And so alongside this promise of cheap energy, which in many ways is the entire foundational realization for Iranian officials about what natural gas can do, comes this other interest of, oh, natural gas can also help us with our declining air quality, right? It can help us with our air quality issues. And in the 50s and the 60s, you see, and this maybe answers your question more directly, you start to see Iranians, especially in places like Tehran, but also in cities like Shiraz, Esfahan, Tabriz, start to write publicly about their. About being upset about declining air quality, right? They penned nostalgic, you know, pieces about how Tehran used to have some of the most beautiful weather and climate in the world. And it is quite a beautiful city when you can actually see the mountains and there's not, you know, a thick soup of smog and air pollution and smoke, right? And so they start writing publicly about this in newspapers and magazines. They start holding public societies and events about how the tragedy of environmental degradation, right? And they're not just seeing what is happening in Tehran, they're also looking to what you could call the industrialized world, which means for them, the west and the Soviet Union, the Soviet aligned world, they're seeing cities like Los Angeles, cities like London have enormous air quality issues. In fact, they see environmental degradation as being essentially the dark underbelly of the modern world. And natural gas in this instance, comes to be seen as having a second promise, which is that we can build a future of cheap energy, of high technology, of modernity, of industry, but we don't need to have this accompanying problem of environmental degradation, specifically air pollution, right? This is the moment. This is the 1960s and 1970s where around the world there's kind of a budding environmentalist consciousness. And Iranians are very much part of this, at least elite ones, you might say, right? They are attending. They're reading books like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. They're attending things like the Only One Earth Conference in Stockholm. They are part of this movement and they are returning to their Iran, and they're seeing natural gas is our key to both industrialize and protect our environment. And I think this is an interesting thing to think about because I think it is important to recognize that natural gas is a hydrocarbon. It's a fossil fuel. It is in some ways, sitting here in June 2026. We look at it and we see it's stuff like this that is causing climate crisis. Right? But in the 1970s, natural gas was. Its development and environmental protection were not seen as opposed to, at least when it came to natural gas in Iran. And so you see a push for natural gas utilization that is yes, rooted in cheap energy, yes, rooted in industrialization, but also rooted in environmental protection. And I think one of the most interesting aspects about this, to get back to your sources, is that it's not just people like the head of the University of Tehran writing in the major national daily. It's not just, you know, people writing letters to the editor. You also see it in the correspondence of Iranian industrialists with the government. Right? You see Iranian industrialists, actually, if you go into the sources, if you go into the archives and you read their correspondence not with the country's Environmental Protection Agency, right? But with the National Iranian Gas Company being like, we want and support the use of natural gas not just because it promises cheap energy, but also because we don't like living in cities polluted by smoke and smog either. Right? And it was, this was, this was one of the most. When I came across this, this was one of the most surprising, I would say for me moments in the research of my book when, you know, I was sitting in Tehran and to see this, this concern for the environment not just among budding environmental activists, but also reflected in the National Archives and the correspondence of the NIGC with industrialists was quite an eye opening moment for me. Like, oh, this is. As I write, it's a messy process as history often is. People have different competing interests, whatever. But to see this concern across such a broad swath of society and represented across such a broad range of sources. I knew that I had to make that its own chapter in the book. Essentially, Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
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Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
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You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly baring it. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG.
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- [42:15]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
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- [42:18]
Interviewer/Host 2
in the 70s and the 70s in Iran are a time of social unrest. The role of the monarchy is increasingly challenged and that will eventually lead to the 79 revolution. How does the development of natural gas infrastructure intertwine with the social situation of the 1970s?
- [42:47]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Yeah, this is a very interesting moment. I think, I think the first, there's a couple, I think points that I need to establish and then things will make more sense. I think one of the things that is underappreciated by people who don't study Iran is that the 1979 revolution was in many ways primarily a populist revolution. Might say it was a right wing populist revolution as opposed to a left wing one. Right. The dominance of Islamist forces, I mean they were always strong, but their utter dominance is actually a post revolutionary phenomenon. There was a lot of contestation for power in the early 1980s. It was not a given that they would come out on top, even though I think they pretty much always had the advantage. For a lot of Iranians, the issue that natural gas came to represent was that the Pahlavi state, the monarchy, was failing to fulfill its promises to them for a better life. So if you go back to chapter two of the book the 1960s, I talk about how, well what we call natural gas, which is the kind of thing that we see running through pipelines, right? You might turn on your gas stove and that's natural gas. There's an allied form of gas, what we call liquid gas or liquid lpg, liquid petroleum gas, which is I think most Americans anyway. I don't know what it's like in Europe are probably most familiar with when it comes to buying bottles of it for their gas grills in their backyard.
- [44:26]
Commercial Announcer 7
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- [44:26]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
They're buying filters. Yeah, canisters, propane, butane for outdoor cooking. Before the first Iran gas trunk line was built, before pipelines became a reality in Iran, natural gas started being used in the form of these canisters of gas. And actually, the gas stove that my father talked about was not connected to a pipeline network. It was this kind of canistered gas. The canister gas was seen as being a nice intermediate or a nice step in the 50s and the 60s, right? It's cleaner than the often charcoal that it was replacing. It's cheap. It's cleaner than the kerosene that it was replacing. But it had its downsides, its upsides was that it could be transported easily. Canisters could be thrown in the back of the truck. But by the 1970s, people are beginning to see this form of gas as being essentially not modern, as being backward, right. As being less good. So that's kind of the first thing that we need to establish. The second was that the developmental programs of the Iranian government, the pre revolutionary Iranian government, very, very strongly prioritized notions of efficiency, right. In some ways this makes sense, right? How can you use as much gas as possible as quickly as possible for as cheaply as possible? And that in many ways pushes them towards the industrial use of gas, right? It is much cheaper to build a few pipelines or a few pipes to major consumers like brick kilns and cement manufacturers and petrochemical plants than it is to build the many, many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of connections you need to make for household gas use. And so over the course of the 70s, right? So the trunk line becomes operational in the early 1970s. Its earliest uses are primarily for in industrial applications, factories. This is why the industrialists that we referred to in the question of air quality, we're so involved in the process, right? Because the government, the NIGC nationally running gas company, is prioritizing that kind of use. I mean, in some ways, as I say, that makes sense, right? It's not an unreasonable thing. The problem for the Pahlavi government is that it has by this point, essentially spent a decade and a half, two decades celebrating natural gas as a triumph of them and of Iran. Right? And they're saying our future is natural gas. This will be a future of clean air, it will be a future of cheap energy, it'll be a future of convenience. Right? All of these things have been part of the Official rhetoric, right? The official discourse surrounding natural gas. And you see it in magazines, you see it in official speeches, you see it in advertisements, right? Iranians are surrounded by this notion that natural gas is the future of Iran. It is, it is the future of Iran built by Iranians for Iranians using Iran's own natural resources. That's what's promised. But what they're seeing by the mid and late 1970s is that's not actually true in their day to day lives, right? There are a few nascent neighborhoods that are being connected to natural gas. These are primarily neighborhoods in major cities that were built after World War II, again largely for technical reasons, right? They have wider streets. The houses are made of brick and concrete and steel as opposed to mud or wood. They're easier to build pipelines in. They're more western style, you might say, more modern. These neighborhoods are populated primarily though by middle class and upper class Iranians as opposed to the majority of Iranians even in urban areas, right, who are crowded into in some cases slums, but in many cases just poor, denser, older neighborhoods. And that's not even, that's even setting aside rural inhabitants who basically aren't being considered by the Iranian government at all, the majority of Iranians are seeing this natural resource, this supposed the future of Iran is not being sended to them. And so this gets folded into broader populist notions in the run up to the revolution and as part of revolution that the monarchical Pathavi state does not have the best interests of Iranians at heart, right? It serves the needs of elites and itself, right? It is more concerned with presenting a particular kind of face to itself and the world than it is to actually helping Iranians. And this is reinforced by the knowledge that significant chunk of gas that the Iran gas trunk line is carrying, about 2/3 of it is actually going to the Soviet Union, right? And so you see people writing and you can, you know, I talk about this in the book and you see in the archives, you see people in villages that run very close, right? Sometimes less than five miles, right? Less than 10 kilometers, within 10 kilometers of the Iran gas trunk line, writing. How can you say that efficiency and economic principles don't allow you to build gas for our village when you're sending huge quantities to foreigners, right? And so it becomes, it's an interesting moment because natural gas in many ways was positioned as an anti colonial symbol by the Patch Ivy state itself, right? But in the 70s it becomes transmuted into a tool of anti colonialism that actually attacks its attacks the monarchy. As the monarchy increasingly comes to be seen as being a tool or a subservient force to outside powers, its own trumpeting of natural gas becomes a weapon used against it. And I think this is interesting to think about. Our conversation today has been primarily focused on issues of gas and energy and technology. But for those who study Iran, the interesting thing to think about is that pre revolutionary Iranian officials are often portrayed or positioned as being compradors. They are compradors of first the British and then the Americans, sometimes the Soviets. That's not often how they understood themselves. And it actually was not often how they even necessarily the goals they wanted. But what they ended up building in some ways reflected the accusations of revolutionary figures. Right. That they didn't care enough about Iranians, that they prioritized sending gas to foreigners and rich industrialists and not about the people of the villages. And so in the post revolutionary moment, so Iran's natural gas infrastructure was primarily built under the Islamic Republic. It follows the patterns and the designs that were set in the Path Levi era in large part, and that's primarily the story my book tells. But I do go a little bit into the era of the Izanic Republic when things start to get built out. And it's interesting to see what changes in the official discourse surrounding natural gas between these two eras. Right. I mentioned in the prevolutionary era, there's a strong emphasis on monumentalism, enormous infrastructures proving the ability of the Pathlavi state to build a modern industrialized, high technology society. So pipelines are trumpeted, big gas refineries are trumpeted, enormous volumes of. How many enormous volumes of natural gas are being used in the era of the Islamic Republic, the post revolutionary era, that concern with scale remains, but it becomes articulated in terms of how many villages now have gas, how many towns have gas, how many connections in poorer neighborhoods of cities have gas. Right. So the scale is still the primary measure of the state's success, but its scale articulated in a different way. Right. And this is of course right. Even on the Islamic Republic, 90 some percent of gas is being used for industry and power generation, electricity generation. Right. That hasn't changed. What does change is how it is being presented and what it ostensibly says about the concerns of the state.
- [53:58]
Filippo de Chirico
Excellent. Thank you so much. I feel you have taken quite a lot of your time. But I have just a final question before we go. And that is, what are you working on at the moment? What is next in the pipeline? Speaking of pipelines.
- [54:17]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Yeah, that's an Interesting question. I mentioned earlier, we talked about petrochemicals and these were the earliest uses of early primary use of natural gas in Iran. My second project actually turns away from gas as an energy source and even away from gas in general, you could say to focus on the production of petrochemicals in the country and especially their incorporation into broader modernizing, industrializing trends in the global South. Right. So basically my interest is, you know, Iran is today a major producer of petrochemicals, generally commodity chemicals, sometimes higher up the production chain. Nonetheless, and this was a deliberate choice of first the Path Levy State and then the Islamic Republic to essentially try to move away from being an export of raw commodities, essentially oil, into having a second export industry. And today, well, sanctions have bitten hard into the exports. But the idea and what actually happened was that Iranian petrochemicals became very widely used in places like India and Pakistan and China and elsewhere across what we sometimes call the global South. And so my interest, the project is still in its early stages, but my interest is in how you could say these regional south south connections were built using Iranian petrochemicals and how they have influenced industrialization and modernization across a big chunk of the world.
- [56:08]
Filippo de Chirico
Wonderful. Tsiruz, thank you so much for your time and thank you for this lovely conversation.
- [56:14]
Dr. Cyrus Moave di Lankarani
Thank you for having me. I had a great time.
- [56:16]
Podcast Outro Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [56:58]
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