Oil Chokepoint
Amanda Boetzkes
Related terms: disaster capitalism, energy humanities, petrocultures, terminal landscapes.
Oil chokepoints are narrow channels in the world’s sea routes to which petroleum products are transported on their way to refinement and global distribution. Chokepoints are sites of pressure in economic circulation: the management of oil commodities is heavily monitored and securitized. When the flow of traffic slows, delays in the supply chain raise shipping costs, which in turn affect the price of energy. But while one might assume that a stoppage at an oil chokepoint would cause a decline in the exchange value of oil, the opposite is true: obstructions to the distribution of oil raise its value. Oil chokepoints might therefore be understood as terminal landscapes, as cultural theorist Jeff Diamanti defines them: sites that hold crude oil in suspension between its concrete materiality and its abstract life as a commodity (Diamanti 2021). Importantly, it is the state of suspension between the concrete and the abstract that affirms the profitability of oil, not just despite the symptoms of climate change, but because of them. The activity at oil chokepoints can therefore be understood through the logic of “disaster capitalism,” the exploitation of economic and ecological crises to further the expansion of a global free market (Klein 2007). By connecting the obstructions at oil chokepoints to fluctuations in the market, we can see the logic of disaster capitalism at work. More than this, by identifying and analyzing sites where environmental degradation is built into the infrastructure and economy, it becomes possible to imagine a different world, one that has revolutionized global exchange and is built on ecologically responsible terms.
The history of oil as a primary source of global energy tells us that profit flows from its infrastructure, from the development of the first multinationals (such as Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, and Texaco) through the charting of pathways of distribution to the development of chemical refineries and the evolution of car cultures (Szeman 2019, 94). But insofar as oil and capitalism are inextricably linked, as Imre Szeman argues, the limits of the global oil supply also point toward the end of capitalism. It is at oil chokepoints that we see a dialectical interplay between the end of oil and the end of capitalism, one which has a bearing on the planetary future. The symptoms of climate change bring a combination of economic and ecological pressures to oil chokepoints, whether from the diminishing reserves of crude, the mediation of its transport by military powers, the demands of transition to a new energy economy, or the environmental effects of global warming, such as drought and unpredictable weather systems. By probing into the political ecology of the chokepoint, we can see how the energy economy depends on crisis for its expansion and evolution.
The Abnormal Returns of Political Ecology
Oil chokepoints are subject to all manner of disruption, from environmental contingencies to outright sabotage. The global market is deeply sensitive to its political ecology. Regardless of the cause, the stoppage of oil freight is recuperated as profit on the stock market. Consider one obstruction that took center stage in the news in 2021, when the container ship Ever Given was blown off course by a strong dust storm, wedging it between both banks of the Suez Canal and blocking thousands of ships for six days. While initially the blockage drove up the cost of oil when experts predicted a period of several weeks before the ship would be dislodged, less than a week later, the situation resolved, and oil prices plummeted. But the blockage itself generated positive abnormal returns on oil investment, a pattern which began three days before the canal was reopened, even when uncertainty remained as to how long it would take to free the ship (Mansour et al. 2021, 65). In short, the event of the obstruction and the indefinite process of regulation at chokepoints is profitable for the stock exchange of oil commodities, from crude to condensate and petrochemicals. The unexpected weather system that blew the Ever Given off course can be understood as what Isabelle Stengers calls an “intrusion of Gaia,” an expression of the indifferent planetary forces that wreak havoc on human infrastructure precisely because they exceed the epistemological framework that instrumentalizes nature as a commodifiable resource (Stengers 2015). But as Stengers points out, the logic of capitalist functioning identifies such intrusions as a new field of opportunity (54). The activity by which oil increases in market value when its distribution is halted by environmental intrusions demonstrates how chokepoints exacerbate the downward spiral between environmental catastrophe and capitalist exploitation.
The sabotage of oil freight at chokepoints is as integral to fluctuations of market value as environmental agents such as weather and drought, which slow shipment times. For example, in May of 2019, four oil tankers were mysteriously damaged in the Strait of Hormuz, near Fujairah emirate. The Strait is one of the largest and busiest oil chokepoints since it joins the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Two of the vessels were owned by Saudi Arabia, one was Norwegian, and the fourth was Emirati. The attacks on the tankers took place as the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was holding emergency talks with European counterparts about mounting tensions in the region (Beaumont and Davies 2019). Less than a week before, Iran had announced that it was pulling out of a nuclear deal signed with world powers in 2015, saying that it would no longer observe limits on the enrichment of uranium, and stop exporting enriched uranium stocks. The announcement came in retaliation for the US President Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal a year before, and his imposition of sanctions on Iran’s nuclear exports. The sabotage of the vessels was therefore a symptom of the geopolitical intensities that are conditioned by chokepoints, particularly as oil nations navigate the energy transition. The incident at the Fujairah chokepoint not only affirmed the stronghold of oil in the global economy. It also intensified the demand for nuclear commodities, thus forging a symbiotic relation between oil capital, military armament, and nuclear energy.
Energy Transition
Oil chokepoints are more than material valves in an economic circulatory system. They are knotted ecologies in which the performative acts of disavowal of the earth disclose our capitalist entanglement with it. Oil nations maintain their economic growth not only by securitizing their resources and stock, but also by demonstrating their command of diverse marketable energies at the chokepoint. While nuclear is considered a ‘clean’ energy, essential to all models of transition that will decrease oil dependency and reduce carbon emissions particularly in Europe, the ecology of oil chokepoints shows how energy transition is actually built on a paradoxical situation in which oil nations hold the economy hostage to a dirty resource while increasing the need for a ‘green,’ but destructive militarized energy.
Energy transition has been leveraged into a repetition of the zero-sum games of the Cold War. It comes as no surprise that the current US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, declared in a LinkedIn post, “There is no such thing as climate change, nor are we in the middle of an energy transition” (Hvid 2025). For all the science that confirms climate change, Wright would have us believe that the more pressing reality – the real fact as opposed to the fake news of a marginal group of environmental activists – is that finance capital and military capability are the main sources and instruments of energy today. Such a statement obviously undermines the scientific consensus. The Trump administration asserts its authority, moreover, by pitting its efficacy in the global market against the scientific consensus on the global condition. Here is the rub between the real ecology and the political fictions that fuel the impasses at oil chokepoints. While they are hubs for the redistribution of market value for the commodities that pass through them, as the sabotage at the Fujairah chokepoint suggests, they are also potential theaters of war. They are zones deployed for the express purpose of staging transnational strife by engaging an interplay of environmental destruction and self-destruction without the interference of civilizing forces of the law (Boetzkes 2023, 193-207). I would argue, however, that there is always an earthly surplus to oil chokepoints that cannot be encompassed by this field of political parlay that is so precariously held together by acts of disavowal, as though the climate crisis paradoxically legitimates the imperial pursuits of oil nations (Zupancic 2024). Grappling with the entanglement of ecology and capitalism at chokepoints should point us toward alternative futures
Cognitive Knot
Oil chokepoints are more than bottlenecks in the topography of oil. They are topological formations, cognitive knots that bind the cultural logic of the global oil economy. They link the real eruption of earthly forces to symbolic political gestures and to the cultural imaginary of oil capitalism. The links and cuts between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary at play in today’s subjects of the global oil regime circulate through one another in a looping structure between the interiority of the human world and the radical exteriority of the earth. As per Jacques Lacan, “Man [sic] goes round in circles because the structure, the structure of man [sic], is toric…The world is toric” (Lacan 1976, 14-20). The topology of oil chokepoints traps the environmental traumas, political parlay, and cultural logic of the economy in a compulsive repetition of its own energy crisis. It thrives on the disavowal of its earthly basis in political articulations that sever the possibilities of transition to a new paradigm of energy exchange that is not grounded in the exploitation of environmental disaster. To analyze oil chokepoints topologically is to implicate them in a cognitive mapping of the social structure of the global energy regime. Fredric Jameson describes the cognitive map as that internalized spatial structure by which one imagines the totality of class relations on a global scale (Jameson 1988, 353). He argues that the implicit gaps between real and imagined spaces result in a crippling incapacity to imagine the world otherwise. We experience in accordance with the knots that entangle our experience in political history. How, then, can we delink the planetary future from the reigning energy regime that covers the world in the topology of oil when that very topology effaces its own origin in the ideology of postwar oil capitalism?
Capitalism’s End
Impediments in the supply chain that arise at oil chokepoints expose the impossibility of launching into a purely virtual system of finance capital. If there were any truth to Chris Wright’s statement that “there is no climate change and we are not in the midst of an energy transition,” and its inference that the ‘real’ energy source is finance capital, then why not divest the global economy of its anchor in oil commodities and achieve a virtualized (but green) energy oligarchy of the 1%? This would be the most profitable ideal. Yet it is an unattainable one. Oil chokepoints lay bare a gap that cannot be traversed between the planetary condition and the logic of energy transition. Obstructions at the chokepoint create profitable crises. But it is precisely their profitability that opens a space by which to maneuver the totalizing strictures of a purely financialized planet. Perversely, Wright’s statement is accurate: we are not in the middle of an energy transition because the conversion of the planet into pure capital is a fantasy that can never be fulfilled. What lies in between the ideal of pure profit and the planetary real is a snarl of infrastructure: freight liners, storage terminals, refineries, and checkpoints, all geared toward forging a passage that it paradoxically impedes.
The oil chokepoint is an instrument of finance capital. But insofar as it is an instrument that is interlaced with global ecologies – that is indeed inextricable from them – it can also unknot itself to choke off the virtual exchange of energy commodities. The profitable obstruction could be undone by an earthquake or tsunami that spirals into an oil spill, explosion, war, or other form of disaster. However, if we were to reverse our perspective of the dialectic between an ecological intrusion and disaster capitalism, we might see that the oil chokepoint is a site at which we can challenge the real profitability of catastrophes and revel in the scenes of capitalism’s end. Therein lies the analytic and imaginative work of the environmental humanities.
References
Beaumont, Peter, and Rob Davies. May 13, 2019. “Saudi Oil Tankers Show ‘Significant Damage’ after Attack – Riyadh.” The Guardian.
Boetzkes, Amanda. 2023. “Behind the Sun: The Theater of Oil Expenditure.” In The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture, 193-207. Edited by Radha Dalal, Sean Roberts, and Jochen Sokoly. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Diamanti, Jeff. 2021. Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum. Locating Terminal Landscapes. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Hvid, Hanna. 2025. “Who is the US Secretary of Energy?” Sermitsiaq May 23.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 343-353. London: MacMillan Education Ltd.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Lacan, Jacques. http://staferla.free.fr/S24/S24%20L'INSU....pdf1976-1977. Seminar XXIV. L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre.
Mansour S. Alfadhli, M.AlAli, and H. AlKulaib. 2021. “The Effect of Suez Canal Blockage on Crude Oil Prices: An Event Study Analysis.” Journal of Business and Management 23 (4): 64-66.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press.
Szeman, Imre. 2019. On Petrocultures. Globalization, Culture, and Energy. Morgantown: West Virginia Press.