Petro-Geographies and Hydrocarbon Realities in Latin America

Despite the lofty goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and the growing availability of renewable sources of energy, the current spatial extent and social implications of oil and natural gas production and consumption are at their largest ever. With more than two million active wells and over 2.5 million km of pipelines around the globe (CIA, 2017; World Oil, 2017), the expanding hydrocarbon extraction footprint (Allred et al., 2015) includes the development of new fields, new governance structures, and new territorialization processes throughout Latin America. This is the first JLAG issue fully dedicated to the geographies of oil and natural gas in Latin America. As the research articles, book reviews, and conclusion demonstrate, the “habits of oil rule” (Lu et al., 2017) and the global reach of hydrocarbons actively (re)create petro-geographies and hydrocarbon realities throughout Latin America.

Latin America’s ties to the global economy, though long established through silver, sugar, coffee, cocaine and other resources (Joseph & Rosenberg, 2006), also entail a history of oil and natural gas production, distribution, transformation, and consumption. The eight research articles in this Special Issue provide empirical and theoretical engagements with hydrocarbon development, addressing themes that include boomtown scenarios, state interventions, conflict over sovereignty, new hydrocarbon territorialities, the socioeconomic implications of shale and unconventional hydrocarbons, the role of reserve replacement strategies, unfolding Caribbean energy developments, and new dispossession laws. The petro-geographies (re)produced and hydrocarbon realities uncovered reveal the complexities of energy landscapes across a variety of scales and regions in Latin America. Research articles in this special issue follow three overlapping themes: (1) oil politics and hydrocarbon rules; (2) boomtown scenarios and community dynamics; and (3) territorialization, conflict, and integration of regional hydrocarbon systems.

In the last two decades, Latin American political ideologies shifted from conservative neoliberal economics to a center-left, post-neoliberal, and neo-extractivist model (Gudynas, 2009; Bebbington & Humphreys Bebbington, 2010). Hydrocarbon research that attended to this shift focused on government control over fossil fuels (Perreault &Valdivia, 2010), the use of oil and gas revenues (Coronil, 1997; Delgado, 2017), and the strategies adopted to deal with the socio-environmental consequences of extraction activities (O’Rourke & Connolly, 2003). We know, for example, that economic dependence on resource extraction affects the institutions, their governance, and the legal frameworks created to regulate extraction and environmental outcomes. Because of constitutional innovations that aimed to protect its natural heritage, Ecuador provides a unique laboratory to investigate how neo-extractivist strategies to secure oil rents overlap with strict environmental laws.

In the first research article in this issue, Teresa Bornschlegl’s “Petro-geographies and the Dialectic of the Everyday” uses critical state theory and institutional ethnography to examine the daily practices of the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Environment’s enforcement of hydrocarbon laws as it struggles with post-extractivist and extractivist forces emanating from the Ecuadorian state. Bornschlegl argues that the habits of oil rule, what Lu et al. (2017, p. 69) call “the entrenched tendencies of governing through practices of the oil industry,” place obstacles to the enforcement of environmental laws while at the same time creating the conditions for its continuation. Through “a process that produces its own becoming,” the article details how other components of the state government and entrenched tendencies of the oil industry create obstacles that perpetuate a positive feedback of environmental inspections, which works to distract environmental enforcement officers from focusing on the prevention of actual environmental damage caused by oil extraction activities.

Controlling access to hydrocarbons also shapes Latin America’s trade and international relations. In Mexico, for example, the 2013 energy reforms opened the hydrocarbon sector to private and foreign firm investments. In “Canadian Capital and the Denationalization of the Mexican Energy Sector,” Aleida Hernandez Cervantes and Anna Zalik show how access to hydrocarbon capital shaped Mexico’s “juridical structures of dispossession” by privatizing a public resource in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital by international entities. In this case, the 2014 crash in global oil prices not only affected Canada’s tar sands oil production, but encouraged Canadian firms, government officials...