One of the crucial and decisive environments of current catalysis research is the state of petrochemistry. It was this 'molecular mobilisation' of fossil ressources - not at least by industrial catalysis - that drove modern technology, history and culture. And it is this background of 130 years of fossil catalysis chemistry, that defines the present task of developing new process strategies and process landscapes. But in order to change the status quo we still need an understanding of how petromodernity worked.
In their new book, UniSysCat-Postdoc Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose present insight into technologies, geographies, politics, and cultures of this ambivalent epoche.
Benjamin Steininger, Alexander Klose: 'Atlas of Petromodernity', translated by Ayça Türkoğlu, Santa Barbara: punctumbooks 2024 356 pages, 44 illustrations, can be downloaded and ordered as a paper copy (27$) from punctumbooks.com.
The book is the updated, enlarged second edition of the German version from 2020, with a new introduction by Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon) and a new long closing chapter ('Zombie') on the Ukraine war and the still not closed case of petromodern destruction.
The ’Atlas’ is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. We stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. We read Bertolt Brecht, technical manuals, and petroculture theory, and we listen to Neil Young. We go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. We confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics
“The Atlas of Petromodernity offers us the chance to be a flaneur within its distinctively curated and therefore somewhat realistic world. Enter at your own risk, with the affinity for risk that may well define you, even still.” - Stephanie LeMenager
For further reading, see also the review of Atlas of Petromodernity by Jens Soentgen in the world's leading journal for the history of science ISIS (English review of the German edition): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/723312