WeSmellGas ([email protected])
Gas is expected to fuel the transition and time is fundamental. So we are here pushing to unlock as much gas as possible in the shortest time. (Managing Director, ENI Cyprus)
Fossil fuels lubricate the workings of capitalism. They heat homes, produce clothes, fuel war planes and global shipping. Amongst the fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—oil is a favoured subject of study; the world’s most important energy source and lucrative commodity, second only to data (Appel 2019; Dietrich 2017; Hanieh 2024; Huber 2013; Khalili 2020; Mitchell 2011). Yet it is oil’s successor, gas, that this Intervention seeks to unpack. Despite its climate impacts, gas has become incorporated into the ever-widening category of “renewable energies”, touted as a “bridge fuel” supporting the energy transition (Stapczynski 2023)—even listed as a “sustainable investment” under the EU Green Taxonomy (Kuzmanova 2022). As such, the importance and demand for gas is rapidly growing, as are the high profits, power and status that empower it (Müller 2025).
In this two-part Intervention, we will focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region to explore how the accumulation of gas relies on the production of race and class.[1] Debates on gas often remain confined to technocratic concerns, erasing the racialised and class-based struggles that underpin our fossil-fuelled crisis. This Intervention offers a different approach, excavating the key mechanisms of racial capitalism that the gas market relies upon to profit. Our first instalment will lay out how the industry operates like an industrial complex. Using historical analysis and ethnographic research from attendance at the 2023 Eastern Mediterranean Energy Conference & Exhibition (EMC), we demonstrate that the existence of corporate influence over policy emerged through empire. Then we move to analyse how a capacious process of racialisation functions differentially across the region, designating certain geographies and populations disposable. Our second, forthcoming essay will expand this further, examining how militarisation and counter-insurgency securitise gas proliferation. As such we hope to unravel racial capitalism: an understanding of capitalism as a mode of production that requires techniques of exclusion and expulsion of targeted populations deemed “surplus” in order to accumulate wealth (Bhattacharyya 2018). The concept’s popularity and use in activist arenas erupted during the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s, yet its origin can be traced back to South African scholars, such as Harold Wolpe (1972) in the anti-apartheid movement who heavily influenced the concept’s most famous theorists, Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall (Levenson and Paret 2024). Our contribution is to set the gas industry in this context, showing how accumulation of gas capital is mediated through the mobile category of race—demarcating certain lands/groups as “inferior stock for domination” (Robinson 1983: 26), and others as racially superior beneficiaries.
Who Benefits? A Gas-Industrial Complex
There can be no disassociation between gas and politics. (Alexandra, freelance political analyst)[2]
The gas industry is a matrix of power, made up of a network of individuals and institutions that grease its production, transportation, and end-line use. It includes the energy corporations buying and exploiting land; the finance capitalists lending to states and companies; the service providers creating pipelines, terminals, and surveillance technologies; the consumer industries using gas to create pesticides, steel, and petrochemicals; the management consultants maximising capital growth and the insurances managing its risk. It also includes the analysts, journalists, intellectuals, and activists narrativising or resisting its expansion (Gilmore et al. 2022). Put together, this is the gas-industrial complex.
Thinking through gas as an industrial complex—a framework based on the prison-industrial complex—helps us explore how the industry functions through racial capitalism and what strategies of racialisation it requires to multiply. To excavate these dynamics, we must ask: Who benefits? Who bears the cost? The exercise reveals the industry’s reliance on racial hierarchies that historically and currently provide justification for exploitation of chosen peripheries, to feed designated cores (hooks 1984). The answer to “who benefits?”is found within the confines of energy conference walls. The 2023 Eastern Mediterranean Energy Conference & Exhibition (EMC) was no exception, shrouded in opulence as Lebanese and Cypriot government ministers rubbed shoulders with the US State Department, managers of oil companies and banks, and business advisors.[3] The newly built “City of Dreams” resort in Limassol welcomed attendees with two-storey-high glass doors, and gold-threaded carpets. Moving through the glistening interior, a casino, Cartier shops, and couture mannequins graced attendees’ promenade to the conference ballroom, eyes darting to badges to discern importance. Within the corporate enclosure, certain hierarchies revealed themselves: European corporations huddled together like high-school cliques (Eni and TotalEnergies), whilst others arrogantly departed after the first day—certain of their regional dominance (Chevron, Exxon, and Shell)—or stayed behind to secure deals that elevated their standing (Energean). We were inside the gas-industrial complex (GIC).
Across the three-day conference (28-30 November 2023), we paid attention to interactions between government officials and energy supermajors, questioning several attendees on who really runs the show: corporations or politicians? Answers were varied, illustrating a mix of competition and synergy that makes the workings of the GIC murky. To unravel this complex relationship, we attended to the region’s most dominant actor: Chevron and its relationship to the US State Department. During panels they mirrored one another, both pushing for infrastructural and political cooperation across the region, especially with Israel. For example, the State Department expressed that “we want to see it more interconnected” and that the US is “working closely on the energy portion of that”, hinting at deals it heavily lobbied for between Israel and Jordan, Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon over the last decade (ICG 2023). Chevron likewise articulated that “we very much see synergies” in the regional market, encouraging states to understand “the significant geopolitical benefits” that will accompany such synergy. As the main operator of “Israeli gas” fields, Chevron has benefited significantly from US lobbying efforts that position Israel as the region’s main gas supplier because the increased exports boost Chevron’s capital gains. As such we see how not only is the language of energy “synergy” and “cooperation” shared between the two entities, but so is the reward for realisation. When there is market synergy, the US foreign policy of economically normalising (with Israel) through gas is achieved, as is Chevron’s desired profits. This blatant alignment was subtly scripted through these panels, exposing how interests mimic one another to reinforce shared imperial objectives.
Such synergy was confirmed during an interview with Joseph (freelance political analyst) who articulated that despite America being a highly capitalist, neoliberal system, “of course there is cooperation, as far as possible there is cooperation [between states and companies]”. This is most evident with state-controlled supermajors like Eni—where the Italian state is a major shareholder—as the corporation has access to public funds and the formation of energy policy.[4] Comparatively, in more neoliberal nation-states like America there is not the same state-ownership structure, meaning corporations like Chevron have greater independence. Nevertheless, “cooperation” still exists in covert ways, primarily because “these companies are very important to the United States … they generate huge revenue and taxes” (Joseph, freelance political analyst). This means that if Chevron profits, the state profits. Such financial dependency also works in reverse: if the state grows/maintains geopolitical power, then Chevron’s investment opportunities grow. As such, when it comes to the confluence of oil and political power, it’s a win-win.
However, the profitable partnership is not merely a product of neoliberalism but carved through imperial violence, historically and today. The history of Chevron and US oil dominance is extensive, but two important historical markers elucidate the vitality of empire to their joint petro-power. First is the dominant use of US oil in the First World War, meaning that when the US entered the war a government advisory board was formed with the six largest US oil firms. This provided corporations direct access to political decision-making and the opportunity to shape policy in their favour, including granting huge tax breaks (Hanieh 2024: 43). This shift not only irreversibly tied US oil firms to political decision-making but specifically connected their financial success to the proliferation of war. This legacy continues today with militaries being the primary consumer of oil (ibid.) and the US oil industry remaining a dominant supplier, including during the ongoing genocide in Palestine (de Leeuw and Noragami 2024). This shows how the policy influence and favourable terms we witness today are a direct result of precedents set up to serve imperialist wars.
The second historical marker is the creation of an “open-door policy” (Hanieh 2024: 55) in the Middle East that challenged exclusively European access to the region’s oil supplies. America’s increased global economic power in the post-war period meant it could wield powerful weapons to dethrone European oil dominance and make “colonialism … work for all aspiring powers”, including the US (Hanieh 2024: 58). This is why American firms like Chevron have long-standing presences in the Eastern Mediterranean’s Arab countries, illustrated by Chevron’s representative boasting at the EMC that “we’ve had a continuous presence in Egypt since 1937”. As such, European colonisation and imperial war-making set the groundwork for contemporary US imperial dominance in the region. This shows the GIC is not merely about corporate–state entanglements but was forged through white supremacist legacies.
Corporate-political synergy is an evolving dynamic that continues today in the gas industry, serving the same interests. History set the stage for corporations to act as soft power on behalf of colonial powers, maintaining control in certain countries through business activities. A contemporary continuation is evidenced through TotalEnergies’ recent presence in Lebanese waters and how this was pushed for by the French government. Joseph revealed that “as a [ex-]colony of France … there’s a connection to Lebanon … [France] wants stability there”, demonstrating how gas companies continue to operate as soft colonial powers to maintain Western interests overseas. Chevron is no different, as its strong presence in stolen Palestinian waters and operation of the occupier’s (Israel) gas infrastructure, is a mechanism to maintain US hegemony in the region. Chevron’s presence is an essential component to the US “gas diplomacy” strategy in the region, designed to push normalisation between Arab nations and Israel through energy-centric deals that force economic cooperation. During an online interview Mahmoud Nawajaa, the BDS National Committee General Coordinator, spotlighted Chevron’s role in these unfoldings, stating that “it is very clear the US wants to maintain Israel and there are tools [for this] … one is this corporation”. In reference to the 2016 Jordan–Israel gas deal, strongly lobbied for by the US, Mahmoud argued:
You can see the US embassy pressuring Jordan to take gas from Israel, and then you find the Israelis granting Chevron the [gas] licence. Everything is connected … it is a sense of collaboration … a new colonialism for US imperialism.
Chevron’s presence is no coincidence. Controlling the Levantine gas reserves and export infrastructure means the US has a far easier time asking Chevron to facilitate and promote energy-centric normalisation or “regional cooperation” with Israel. This shows how the modern gas trade is a continuation of the same historical processes that instrumentalised war and imperial domination for white supremacist powers. Indeed, the language at industry conferences like the EMC, points to material synergies that are inextricable from (neo)colonial agendas, benefiting a corporate-political paradigm baked in whiteness. As such, the gas-industrial complex is exposed: a matrix of power made through the imperialism of the past and feeding off racialised violences in the present.
Who Bears the Cost? Sacrifice Zones
There’s a new wave of energy colonialism, always sacrificing North African or Southern European countries for gas demands of the most “developed” in Europe. (Pippo, ReCommon)
Now that we have established “who benefits” and how, it is crucial to examine “who bears the cost”. Indeed, under racial capitalism the material benefits felt in the GIC are predicated on the material losses of others, making it impossible to effectively understand how the gas trade functions through race and class without attending to the geographies, lands, and peoples sacrificed for its proliferation (Hamouchene 2016). This is why we spent two months with activists and communities on the frontlines of gas extraction across the EastMed in addition to attending the conference, to examine who and what is the “sacrifice zone” (Hamouchene 2016). We found that many communities both within and beyond the “Global South” identified as living in these sacrifice zones, including in Greece and Southern Italy. This complicates binary demarcations of neocolonial extractivism that situate Africa, Asia, and Latin America as expendable to a homogenous Europe. This does not mean that normative neocolonial extractivism has diminished. Indeed, the Egyptian working class is the sacrifice in a new agreement that commits Egypt to export gas to Europe whilst its own population is suffering severe shortages. This uneven trade reproduces decades of colonial relations that displace socio-economic costs onto North African working classes to benefit imperial elites. Gas shortages already catapulted Egypt into widespread industrial shutdown and routine power cuts, claiming 40 lives in the Aswan province this summer due to broken ventilation systems in 49.6°C heat (El-Gaafary 2024). It is clear that global racial hierarchies still govern the energy market, determining who is dehumanised and who profits. This section seeks to expand this purview and locate geographies beyond the “Global South” as subjected to differential processes of racialisation that likewise designate them “the sacrifice” for gas growth.
Sacrifice zones are constructed through a global process of racialisation that uses regional and class differences to categorise lives into worthy and disposable (Bhattacharyya 2018). The exercise is essential in designing flows of capital, demarcating certain populations as deserving subjects of wealth, and others as undeserving subjects of exploitation. Scholars also emphasise the flexibility of race (Go 2021) and how despite it being a mode of organisation signalling impassable difference, it is the construct’s contingency and mutation that makes it so powerful (Khalili 2023). Racialisation is therefore not an epidermal process but capacious and ever-evolving; the subjects racialised as inferior are constantly shapeshifting. Bhattacharyya (2018: 22) argues that in the context of ecological crisis and a consciousness of limited resources, “there is an escalating rush to divide humanity into the worthy and the disposable”. We seek to extend and evidence this argumentation, showing specifically how the imposed temporal limit on gas extraction is escalating corporate desperation to extract fossil fuels, wherever and however they can (Raval and Kerr 2021). Processes of racialisation are evolving accordingly within and beyond European borders to designate more and more places as “sacrifice zones”.
A clear example is Southern Italy where the subjectivity of “sacrificial life” is felt acutely. Activists from islands like Sicily and Sardinia described their experience as an “internal colonial condition” whereby locals live in “an area of economic, material, energy, and human extraction” (Guilia) imposed by the Italian state to serve mainland residents. Activists’ response was to fight for independence and resist the industrial occupations of military and energy infrastructures (oil refineries, liquefied natural gas [LNG] terminals) across their islands that situate them as in servitu energetica (“in energy servitude”) to another. In mainland Southern Italy communities expressed similar sentiments of being trapped in “cycle[s] of value or disvalue” (Pippo) that benefit Northern Italians. These descriptions echo the racial logic of disposable versus worthy as certain groups are perpetually marked as “one of Italy’s laboratories of violations” (Pippo) with communities decimated by the revolving doors of extractive industries. Interviewees referenced the derogatory term terroni—developed by Northern Italians to describe Southerners as backward farmers who only knew how to work the land, “terra”—to show the racism that underlies their experience. This technique of othering and its effects is clearly racial in character, ascribing Southern populations with an inferior status to justify decades of systematic underdevelopment and chronic state abandonment.
The working-class town Taranto is a pertinent example of how this operates not only through gas extraction but through (industrial) gas consumption. Taranto has been plagued for 60 years by a highly polluting steel factory, owned by ILVA, that consumes gas purchased from Eni (Giuffrida 2024). The toxic red iron dust spewing daily from the factory contains a mix of minerals, metals and carcinogenic dioxins that have not only destroyed farming lands and fishing industries but caused thousands of deaths from cancer, including children’s (ibid.). At a community gathering, attendees identified their condition as living “within the margins” (Pietro)—a periphery sacrificed for a chosen core. They acknowledged the existence of a “hierarchy of margins” (Pietro) that means others face greater oppression, yet still placed themselves as a product of racial hierarchies that deem their lives unimportant. Indeed, the local suffering from the ILVA factory has been devastating. Schools in Taranto continue to be closed due to fume intensity, with many adults forced to work inside the factory as other local employment opportunities stopped. Despite this, the state remains committed to extending the factory’s lifespan at all costs (Parodi 2024), meaning residents who cannot afford to leave Taranto are forced to stay and “lead short, limited lives” (Li 2010: 66). It is clear that Taranto is not merely a sacrifice zone but a zone of incarceration. It is impossible to ignore parallels to Gilmore’s (2007: 28) summary of racism, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”, as Southern Italy’s working class is confined to precarity and death in pursuit of steel and gas capital.
However, the GIC not only deepens existing cycles of extraction but expands their boundaries. Territories previously marked pristine and pure are now allocated for extractivism with a global energy crisis ensuing. Ioannina in Northern Greece is a clear example as communities expressed shock at their touristic landscape being chosen by Energean as the first on-land drilling project for gas in the country. Locals’ despair was also linked to the specific site: the village’s “sacred mountain” atop important water reserves (Christian), threatening vital resources and connection to their land. One interviewee argued that destruction of the water supplies and surrounding farmland is catastrophic for the village, destroying their “self-sufficient and traditional way of living” in order to “supply another city” with energy (Christian). Christian described how the exploitation is legitimised: as a rural village far from Athens, “we are the most deprived and marginalised communities” and thus are treated as expendable to the Greek state, to Northern European energy security and gas accumulation. The unequal relations and human value within Europe is revealed as more communities are expelled from the “worthy” category to accommodate rampant corporate greed. For Christian, this means facing what scholars have called accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005)—a critical process in the racial capitalist machine whereby populations are stripped of their resources without recourse to re-enter an alternative economy (Bhattacharyya 2018). Christian feared that the project will “force us to be internally displaced … [and] abandon our villages” as the community’s means of income—their land and livestock—will be erased. Rooted to the land, Christian is concerned that locals will be unable to effectively re-enter economic life in Athens and be “totally abandoned” by the state. Through analysing this example, we can see how poor, rural communities in Greece are also being sacrificed for fossil capital and the GIC’s exponential growth. Therefore, it is clear we must challenge our conceptions of who and where is being absorbed into “racially inferior” categories for extraction. It is an expanding category with intensifying stealthy violence within and beyond European borders. We must notice and respond to this totality in order to truly comprehend the nuance and power of who can and does bear the cost for the GIC.
To conclude, we urge movements and intellectuals to turn to their own localities and campaigns to ask the questions: Who benefits? Who bears this cost? Through this exercise we attend to the differential ways that race and class operate and keep the fossil gas industry alive. It is through the production of difference and the continuation of colonial legacies that the gas industry is able to exponentially profit, irreversibly reshaping localities and the global map in the process. As fossil gas demand rises, so must our resistance and attention to it. It is abundantly clear that the gas-industrial complex we have laid out must be met with equal measures of transnational uprisings and disruption. The colonial cartography is apparent; now is the time to counter it with an internationalist map of solidarity that both takes account of our differences and the experiences that bind us. Only then can we effectively unite to oppose the power of the gas-industrial complex and realise our imagined future where no one bears the cost.
Endnotes
[1] WeSmellGas is an abolitionist collective of organisers, researchers, and film-makers based in Northern Europe. We exist to dismantle Europe’s imperialist energy system, using crucial research, disruptive action, and film to expose and challenge its violence. In 2022, we collectively produced a decolonial analysis on the gas industry, the “gas-industrial complex” (GIC), building on the work of Black radical scholars and theories of the prison-industrial complex. An Antipode Foundation “Right to the Discipline” research grant enabled us to conduct in-depth ethnographic research on how the GIC operates in the Eastern Mediterranean. This project was mentored by Prof. Laleh Khalili, and culminated in this two-part Intervention, in addition to a series of short films.
[2] Freelance political analysts provide insights, research, and reports for a range of clients on topics pertaining to their expertise. They are often employed as project-based consultants by government bodies or corporations to advise on new business ventures, investments, or policy changes. In this case, Alexandra—and Joseph below—are experts on natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. This article uses pseudonyms to protect the identity of interviewees.
[3] One member of WeSmellGas attended the 2023 Eastern Mediterranean Energy Conference & Exhibition in Limassol, Cyprus, for three days as a researcher, alongside the scholar Dr. Sharri Plonksi. They conducted participant observation and political ethnography on the corporate and political networks that govern the gas industry. This immersive study of power was essential to understand how the gas-industrial complex functions, who benefits from it, and how its workings are narrated. In addition, two members from WeSmellGas conducted two months of ethnography across Lebanon, Greece, Cyprus, and Italy to understand the racialised impacts of fossil gas expansion across the region. During the trip we interviewed community activists in port cities, attended anti-militarisation activist camps, visited infrastructural sites, and interviewed political analysts. We conducted over 40 semi-structured interviews during the trip. The interviews, camp participation, and site visits were recorded audio-visually with consent from participants. The footage is in production for a series of short film. Both research trips were funded by the Antipode Foundation “Right to the Discipline” research grant awarded in 2022. As Northern European climate justice and anti-racist activists we were well-positioned to conduct this research. We had access to spaces of power, such as the Conference, but were also embedded in different activist networks within and beyond Europe. We utilised the research project as an opportunity to create content that de-centred Northern European perspectives in climate and anti-fossil fuel debates, and to build greater bonds of solidarity and trust with our comrades across the Eastern Mediterranean.
[4] Source: ReCommon, an Italian research-activist collective who we interviewed to understand Italian corporations’ interests and operations in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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