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Accepted Paper:
Mapping American energy infrastructure, 1830-2023
Robert Suits
(University of Edinburgh)
Elisabeth Moyer
(University of Chicago)
Nathan Matteson
(DePaul University)
Energy infrastructure plays a central role in the rise of fossil-fueled civilization. This paper details a comprehensive interdisciplinary historical mapping project exploring its development in the U.S., and some of its implications for how we might understand the energy system and its history.
Paper long abstract:
The explosive growth of energy use, though calamitous for the planet, is astounding. Vast networks of infrastructure are required to harvest, transform, and carry energy from nonhuman sources into human economies. In this paper, I will outline a digital interdisciplinary project to map and catalogue the histories of these infrastructures in the United States. Collectively, we have mapped and dated hundreds of oil pipelines, thousands of natural gas pipelines, large-scale electricity transmission lines, power plants, oil refineries, and coal mines, with the intention of producing a series of interactive historical maps and a corresponding database for further and future inquiries into the nature of the U.S. energy system. I will discuss some of the methods and sources used for the mapping project, as well as the scholarly and policy implications. Among these are how built infrastructure profoundly constrains past and future energy transitions, playing a major role in why some were successful and some were not, with path dependencies on fossil fuels built into the very landscape.