Securing Natural Gas: Entity-Attentive Security Research

Abstract

Natural gas is a troublesome and ‘wayward’ material (Bridge, 2004; 396). Amongst other qualities, it is invisible, intangible, naturally odorless, highly inflammable, and constantly resistant to the forces that contain it. This thesis provides an account of how these qualities both introduce a series of insecurities to everyday social environments, and also make it a challenging material to govern. Specifically, I examine the way that security is performed around gas circulations in the UK’s transmission and distribution pipelines, and I describe how a range of specialized security practices have been developed according to the particular challenges that gas’s materiality presents.

In developing this account, I make two claims. First, I argue that performances of security cannot be adequately understood without attending to the specific qualities of the circulating elements around which it is practiced. Here I build upon Dillon’s (1996) observation that security has tended to be treated as a noun that is independent of the elements that it is practiced in relation to. As a consequence, it has typically been framed as a broadly transferrable set of practices that can be more-or-less unproblematically applied to very different elements. I suggest that this abstraction has resulted in the further reduction of security into two broad practices: acts of circulatory filtration (in which risky elements are separated from flows of safe bodies, materials and things), and acts of circulatory maintenance (whereby security is performed by ensuring the continuity of particular circulations). It is my contention in this thesis that security scholars need to pay better attention to the ways in which the specific material qualities of circulating elements are generative of particular forms of securing practice. Indeed, by examining the way that security is performed around gas, I describe a series of practices that far exceed those described in accounts that present security as a matter of circulatory filtration or maintenance.

My second claim is that the spaces and scales at which security is analyzed need to be expanded. I demonstrate how the critical security studies and energy security literatures have both tended to focus on security’s practice within particular nodes, at the exclusion of the performances of security (and forms of insecurity) that develop across the journeys of circulating elements; as they move between nodes. Indeed, I suggest that circulation has often been reduced in these accounts to thin, straight, and featureless lines that are largely inconsequential for performances of security. I seek to trouble this reduction, following gas as it travels through the UK gas transport infrastructures, tracing the various forms of (in)security that develop across these journeys.

As a consequence of these two claims, security takes quite a different form in this account to its various depictions in the existing security literatures. I describe it as consisting of a series of ontological projects that are enacted across the lengths and breadths of gas’s circulations, and through which the material reality of natural gas is constantly (re)organised in attempts to facilitate, ‘compensate for’, and ‘cancel out’ particular kinds of perceived potential phenomena (Foucault, 2007; 36). Significantly, these performances are shown to be structured, or ‘programmed’ (Latour, 1991), through the coming together of multiple interests that pertain to a variety of heterogeneous actors and manifold referent objects. Different interests are shown to come together across gas’s journeys, and to undergo ongoing processes of negotiation that result in a variety of security performances, through which different imperatives are pursued. As such, I suggest that gas becomes ‘modulated’ (Deleuze, 1992) – it is constantly transformed from moment to moment, across the full duration of its circulatory journeys.