Disposable Ordos: The making of an energy resource frontier in western China

- This article deploys a critical, relational concept of the frontier to China's energy sector.
- It finds China's west is being refigured as an energy resource supply zone.
- State energy policy is important in helping bring about geographical shifts in energy resource production.
- Local factors are key in driving frontier resource booms.
- Ordos is an epicenter of China's western energy resource frontiers and exemplifies the unruly nature of such sites.

China's economic growth in recent decades has been accompanied by vigorous growth in energy production and consumption. This article analyzes geographical shifts in the production of energy resources using a relational frontier concept. The frontier concept is deployed to examine the forces driving energy resource production to territories in China's west. Through an understanding of frontiers as peculiar places shaped by flows of capital and contingent socio-economic conditions, this study underscores the both the contributions of national-level energy policy and local political-economy in bringing about a pronounced shift in the distribution of energy resource supply whereby the country's west is increasingly recast as a production zone for energy and the east as a consumption zone. A case study of coal production in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region's Ordos Municipality in the 2000s details the unfolding of frontier processes for this key energy resource.