Energy Technologies, Development, and the Environment in Modern Iran, 1935-2005

FAIN: DOI-293761-23

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Ciruce Alexander Movahedi-Lankarani (Project Director: February 2023 to present)

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of the use of natural gas in Iran. 

This project focuses on the history natural gas in 20th-century Iran, using the energy source—as both a varied material substance and an object of discourse—as a lens to study the country’s developmental programs, its charged politics of modernization, and their connection to the natural world. It follows the movement of gas from underground reservoirs through infrastructures of refining and distribution into everyday life, in the process exploring the roles of planners, oil firms, industrialists, consumers, mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself. Drawing upon perspectives from Middle Eastern history, science and technology studies, and political ecology, it contributes to our knowledge of modern Iran, the creation of fossil fuel energy systems in the Global South, the role of anticolonial politics in the rise of hydrocarbon energy regimes and the climate crises they have spawned, and the theorization of precarity as an entrepot to studying human-nature interactions.

Media Coverage

Accelerant (feat. Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani) (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Dominic Boyer
Publication: Cultures of Energy: The Energy Humanities Podcast
Date: 5/17/2026
Abstract: Dominic and Cymene eat crepes, share limericks and wonder whether dogs and rabbits might hold the secret to world peace on this week’s episode. Then (13:09) we welcome Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani to the pod to talk about his new book Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran newly out from Stanford U Press. We begin with how natural gas overcame its second-class status among the hydrocarbons to become the central pillar of Iranian national development strategies in the middle of the 20th century. We talk about how the material density and volatility of gas impacted efforts at building infrastructure, how Iran had to navigate the imperial ambitions of Britain, the US and the Soviet Union to claim its gas for itself, and how Iran balanced industrial and environmental goals in its development process. Ciruce explains how gas seemed to offer Iran pathways to both a glorious future and a return to a cherished past. And he explains how the Islamic Republic
URL: https://cenhs.libsyn.com/255-accelerant-feat-ciruce-mohavedi-lankarani

Accelerant (Media Coverage)
Author(s):
Publication: New Books Network
Date: 6/24/2026
URL: https://newbooksnetwork.com/accelerant

Associated Products

A Firm Policy Decision: Infrastructural Form and Pahlavi Developmentalism at the Ahvāz Pipe Mill (Article)
Title: A Firm Policy Decision: Infrastructural Form and Pahlavi Developmentalism at the Ahvāz Pipe Mill
Author: Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani
Abstract: By examining the history of the Ahvāz pipe mill in the 1960s and 1970s, this article investigates the manner in which competing understandings of Iran's modernizing trajectory among Pahlavi officials were bound up with the material aspects of steel, such as weight, volume, and form. The mill was built to provide pipe for the First Iran Gas Trunkline, a sprawling system intended to gather, refine, and transport natural gas to Iranian cities and the Soviet Caucasus. Officials overseeing the project debated whether the mill's design should prioritize serving the pipeline project or, more ambitiously, establish a new pipe rolling industry able to serve domestic and regional markets. Argued in this article is the significance of attending to infrastructure and materiality in understanding Iran's twentieth-century history of developmentalism.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2024.31
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Iranian Studies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran (Book)
Title: Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran
Author: Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani
Abstract: Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied top-down politics of modernization to bottom-up feelings of national belonging. Accelerant analyzes the interwoven histories of energy, development, and the environment in Iran. Following the movement of natural gas from underground deposits, through infrastructures of refining and distribution, and into everyday life, Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani explores the roles of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, and consumers—as well as the mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself—to show how natural gas emerged as a crucial enabler of industrialization and a strong impetus for resource nationalism. Tracing the transformation of gas from a waste product into a vital resource, this book offers a history of anticolonial developmentalism in Iran—revealing a key driver toward intensified energy use that suggests why and how societies in the Global South became voracious consumers of fossil fuel energy.
Year: 2026
Primary URL: https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/accelerant
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website for the book
Secondary URL: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1529601335
Secondary URL Description: WorldCat entry for the book
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1503646223
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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