Geoforum 35 (2004) 395–397

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Editorial

Gas, and how to get it q

The other day I was leafing through the Financial

Times and came across a short story about natural gas

(James, 2003). (Note: readers for whom an interest in

natural gas is improbable, please bear with me). It de-

scribed two proposed pipelines to ferry natural gas fromthe Bahamas to Florida. At first glance there is nothing

remarkable about this story: like the rest of the US, the

market for natural gas in Florida is booming and long-

distance gas pipelines are scarcely novel (extensive

pipeline systems have been part of the energy landscape

of Europe and the US for decades). Yet what is striking

is that the Bahamas possesses no reserves of natural gas.

The Bahamas does, however, has an extensive coast-linewith deep water access (some islands are less than 100

miles from the Florida coast) and a government seeking

further diversification of the economy beyond tourism

and banking. Thus reading further, it emerged that the

Bahamas-Florida pipelines will not transport gas ex-

tracted in the Bahamas, but that the Caribbean islands

will serve as transhipment points in an evolving global

network of gas supply. Terminals proposed for GrandBahama and the Biminis will receive liquefied natural

gas (LNG) by tanker from points south and east such as

Nigeria, Algeria, Venezuela and Trinidad, convert the

LNG back to gas, and pump it through submarine

pipelines to the Florida market.

Latent within this short tale are significant questions

that invite––even demand––interpretation and analysis

from a critical geography. Natural gas is a commoditywith geographical ambition. Only incipiently global,

natural gas serves as a contemporary analogue for other

basic commodities––such as coal, wheat and copper––

for which functioning global markets emerged in the

mid-19th century. If constructed, LNG terminals in the

Caribbean––or any of the other 30–40 LNG facilities

proposed for tidewater communities in Canada, Mexico

and around the United States from Maine to Louisianaand California––will connect the burgeoning North

American gas market with reserves in Australia, Indo-

qThis editorial was written while the author was a Ciriacy-Wantrup

Fellow in Natural Resources Studies at the University of California-

Berkeley (January–December 2004).

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.05.002

nesia, Qatar, Venezuela and Peru that are currently

beyond the reach of the continent’s terrestrial pipelines.

Some estimates expect LNG to rise from 2% to as much

as 30% of the US gas market over the next twenty years.

Thus was Business Week able to enthuse in a recent pieceon LNG––and with a rather quaint thrill at the unfa-

miliar intimacies of collapsing space––that within five

years ‘‘a homeowner in Los Angeles could be cooking

dinner with natural gas that has come from as far away

as Russia or Australia.’’ (Forest, 2004).

The ‘white knight’ of fossil fuels, natural gas is fre-

quently acclaimed as a transitional ‘fuel for the future,’

yet it demonstrates a stubbornly anachronistic geogra-phy of commodity supply. From well-head to burner-

tip, the gas commodity chain remains substantially

contained within continental bounds. Even when the

long-standing exceptions of LNG shipments to Japan

and South Korea are accounted for, physical trade in

gas between continental markets accounts for a much

smaller proportion of world consumption than is true

for oil (crude oil exports account for 42% of consump-tion compared to 17% of gas, of which only one-third is

inter-continental trade). Extraordinary scientific and

capital resources, however, have been brought to bear in

the last few years in an effort to re-scale the geographies

of natural gas. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Yergin

and Michael Stoppard argue that the global gas business

is poised for a $200 billion expansion (Yergin and

Stoppard, 2003). Natural gas, then, provides anopportunity to witness in real time the ‘historic’ pro-

cesses through which the multi-scalar geographies of a

‘global’ commodity are produced.

Engineering a global commodity

Natural gas is a classic ‘gift of nature’ produced

through the biophysical processes of biological decay,

assisted by heat and pressure over long periods of time.

One learns early on that methane is plentiful and, in small

quantities, not at all hard to find: stumble around in aswamp for a few minutes and methane (‘marsh gas’)

quickly begins to bubble up between one’s toes. But

1 The British Thermal Unit (Btu) provides a standard measure for

comparing the energy content of natural gas and other fuels. A Btu is

defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one

pound of water one degree Fahrenheit (from 60 to 61 degrees F) at a

pressure of one atmosphere.

396 Editorial / Geoforum 35 (2004) 395–397

producing gas as a commodity, as a substance to be ex-

changed on the market, takes work. The physical prop-

erties of methane and the conditions of its occurrence do

not readily comply with the commodity form. A sub-stance synonymous with fluidity and effervescence, gas is

defined by unpredictable motion both at the molecular

level and within popular culture, where the gaseous and

ethereal serve as antonyms for the solidity and fixity of the

terrestrial. Its large volume per unit of energy, propensity

to expansion, and ignition potential make gas difficult to

move in an orderly and predictable manner. Natural gas,

then––to borrow the title of Karen Bakker’s recent bookon water (Bakker, 2004)––is an uncooperative commod-

ity: it may have use-value and be in plentiful supply, but

producing its exchange value requires the labours of

science, capital and law. And even when engineered

as a commodity, the physical qualities of the resource

can impede the realization of profits from its exchange.

A large proportion of the world’s potential gas re-

serves are regarded as ‘stranded’ since there is currentlyno cost-effective means of bringing them to market.

Stranded gas reserves are estimated to be in the range of

4500 trillion cubic feet of gas, that’s more gas than the

world economy has yet consumed. Further, much of the

gas produced as a by-product of oil extraction has tra-

ditionally been flared as waste because of the difficulties

of handling it on site or getting it to market. In the Niger

Delta, for example, over three-quarters of the gas pro-duced during oil production has, until recently, been

flared. Since the late 1990s, however, an increasing pro-

portion of flared gas in the Delta has been captured and

converted to LNG for export to Europe and North

America. Whether stranded or flared, much of the

world’s natural gas reserves have lain external to the

economy, physical substances for which there was no

exchange value. The metaphor of being ‘stranded’ be-yond the economy is particularly illuminating: it estab-

lishes the ‘natural’ state as one of economic connectivity

not isolation, positions gas production as a heroic nar-

rative of search and rescue, and highlights how the pri-

mary task––taken up by commercial gas research––is to

transform use value into exchange value. But re-working

the space economy of natural gas necessarily confronts

the physicality of gas itself. To produce gas as a com-modity, its chemical and physical variability must be

managed via standardization: natural gas is actually a

mixture of different gases, and the valuable methane

content varies from 70% to over 90% depending on the

reserve. Producing gas as an exchangeable commodity,

therefore, requires simplifying its natural variability into

a fungible form that can be traded on gas markets (gas

futures markets were introduced to the New York Mer-cantile Exchange in 1990 and on the International

Petroleum Exchange in 1997).

Standardization alone, however, does not a com-

modity make. Extracting the exchange value of stranded

gas reserves requires reducing the costs of inter-conti-

nental transport and to do this, the nature of gas itself

must be reconfigured. LNG, therefore, is a story about

prolific capitalist ingenuity to work with (and surmount)the chemical and physical qualities of gas in order to reign

into the market a substance that has long been regarded

as waste. A whole industry has emerged––gas to liquids

technology––dedicated to corralling the waywardness

and variability of gas and rendering it a commodity

compliant with the workings of the market. By decreasing

the motion of methane molecules and slowing them down

(i.e. by changing the density of methane via cryogeniccooling to minus 162 �C)methane gas can be transformedinto a liquid that occupies 1/600th of the original gas

volume. Loaded onto tankers and kept at its cryogenic

boiling point, the double transfiguration of liquefaction

(gas to liquid) and gasification (liquid to gas) enables a re-

scaling of the geography of gas supply beyond the con-

tinental margins. These changes of phase, however, can

occur only in specific physical conditions––temperature,pressure and volume––and these constrain the way in

which the commodification of flared or stranded reserves

is socially organized. The specificity of these conditions

means that the capital costs for constructing liquefaction

and gasification plants are huge and, as a result, LNG

projects can only be undertaken by economic entities

able to secure the requisite level of financing (i.e. a small

number of very large firms, or state-owned companies,such as the Algeria’s Sonatrach). Further, the risks of

these massive investments are hedged by long-term sup-

ply contracts that tie LNG-import terminals to specific

gas fields for up to 20 years at a time. As Yergin and

Stoppard point out, this ‘‘LNG paradigm’’ is quite dif-

ferent to the social organization of continental gas pro-

duction and delivery. The evolution of a global market

for natural gas, therefore, provides a concrete illustrationof how the re-working of space is achieved through the

re-working of nature and, moreover, how the physical

properties and conditions of a resource constrain the

form in which it can be successfully commodified.

High and rising

Such terminology is, of course, far from the pages of

journals like Business Week and the Financial Times.

There the discussion about gas takes its cue from his-

torically high natural gas prices––spot prices in theNorth American gas market in the last few months have

exceeded $6 per million Btu 1––the long-term average is

Editorial / Geoforum 35 (2004) 395–397 397

closer to $3––and the US faces a ‘‘supply gap’’ that is

expected to grow quickly. In the US, demand for gas has

surged for electricity-generation following de-regulation

(gas use for electric power generation has increased 40%since 1990) and in the industrial sector where strategies

of fuel switching rather than energy conservation have

helped to meet environmental goals. Natural gas in the

United States, then, is at odds with the long-term trend

towards falling commodity prices. The current gas

market in the US demonstrates, in the breach, how

falling commodity prices (in the face of prodigious re-

source consumption) have historically been achieved, atleast in part, by tapping extra-local sources of supply.

This strategy of reaching to the ‘ends of the earth’ has,

until recently, met its limits at the continental margins.

The narrative of a gas ‘‘gap’’––with its moral imper-

ative of connectivity that would solve a US shortage by

linking to external abundance––naturalizes US scarcity

in order to overcome it. Yet both ‘scarcity’ (in the US)

and ‘surplus’ (i.e. stranded gas reserves) are createdthrough the processes of uneven development and only

have meaning in relation to the organization of local

and regional economies. To say that gas is ‘stranded’ (in

Bolivia, Peru or Nigeria, for example) is to simulta-

neously recognize and occlude the way surplus and

scarcity reflect judgements about returns on investment.

‘Surplus’ expresses a relatively low local exchange value

for gas and the fact that supplying gas to distant ratherthan local markets will produce greater returns on

investment. Last year’s protests in Bolivia, over pro-

posed gas exports to the US, highlighted (among other

things) how relatively weak local market demand can

reflect the failure of conventional models of industrial

development and the exclusion, via poverty, of many

potential gas users from the market place.

The protests in Bolivia are but one example of thecontested landscapes of gas commodification, and indi-

cate how geographies of gas supply are more complex

than narratives of global market integration allow. New

geographies of gas are emerging through the processes

of inter-capitalist competition, as companies vie for

optimum pipeline routes and liquefaction/gasification

sites, and struggle––with the state and each other––over

access rights to the large gas deposits. Geographies ofgas are also shaped in significant ways by practices of

negotiation and resistance. Proposed gasification plants

have been defeated or significantly modified in San

Francisco Bay, Baja California, and Harpswell, Maine,

and there is active resistance to proposed facilities in

Fall River, Massachusetts and in the Bahamas.

A revived resource geography?

Let’s return briefly to the Bahamas. Stories like that

related in the Financial Times hint at the socially-con-

tested, technically-challenging processes of re-working

space and nature that produce contemporary geogra-

phies of resource supply. The business press can be an

excellent preliminary resource in this regard, since itscolumn inches frequently speak to the hard tasks of

producing space and nature. Yet such stories call out for

an approach that can simultaneously elaborate and cri-

tique their suggestive descriptions of emergent resource

geographies. Contemporary geography, however, is lar-

gely pre-occupied with interests other than those of basic

commodities. An earlier period of geographical inquiry

had no such aversion: it inventoried, catalogued andspeculated about resources with an unswerving instru-

mentalism. The paradoxical legacies of this earlier period

are (1) a richly detailed set of resource descriptions,

assessments and maps that, read critically, provide a

fascinating account of the evolution of a global resource

economy, and (2) a lingering (false) suspicion that re-

source geographies must of necessity be descriptive and

managerialist in orientation. Recent contributions to theliterature––some of it within the pages of this journal––

suggest this misapprehension may be finally being laid to

rest. Through work on oil, water, timber, minerals and

fish (among others), this work collectively sketches the

outlines of a critical resource geography that exhumes

rather than represses the biophysical qualities and

dynamics of resources, and which emphasizes how these

structure the conditions and social organization ofcommodification. Critical resource geographies take

seriously––that is, they seek to denaturalize and account

for––the processes by which particular parts of the

environment become produced as resources. Such an

approach argues that producing resources for capitalist

exchange is a non-trivial task: it requires the regulatory

practices of science, technology, capital and law in order

to re-work existing natures and space.

References

Bakker, K., 2004. An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water

in England and Wales. Oxford University Press.

Forest, S., 2004. Hot Debate over a cool fuel. Business Week. March 1

2004: IM8.

James, C., 2003. Bahamas weighs up plans to build gas terminals.

Financial Times (USA edition), p. 6.

Yergin, D., Stoppard, M., 2003. The next prize. Foreign Affairs 82 (6),

103.

Gavin Bridge

Department of Geography

Syracuse University

144 Eggers Hall

Syracuse, NY 13244 1020

USA

E-mail address: gbridge@maxwell.syr.edu