The dominant narrative on oil in the Middle East usually explains the formation of the oil producing state in terms of a simple relationship between economics and politics. Countries such as Iran suffer from a heavy reliance on oil revenues which often leads to authoritarian rule and little prospects for democracy. Theories of the state more specifically have tended to focus on questions of sovereignty or executive power. As a result, they overlook the large-scale technical projects of building energy networks that have often represented the most widespread, complex and localized forms of state power and authority. Is it enough to think of oil as simply a natural resource that affects political systems, social and economic orders, and state formation from the outside while simultaneously blocking the possibility for more democratic forms of politics? What if we were to follow the oil itself and map the socio-technical arrangements in which it gets produced, transported, and sold? The origins of some of the most important battles concerning the Iranian state’s demand for sovereignty over its oil resources emerged within specific controversies over the exact nature of Anglo-Iranian oil and its life span, production rates, and reserve estimates. Based on archival research in Iran and the UK, this paper takes seriously the materiality of oil to reveal how the Iranian state was shaped in important ways by the battle to control Iran’s oil precisely at sites of technicality and petroleum knowledge gathering. Article 14 of the newly revised 1933 concession stipulated that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) held the “obligation to place at the disposal of the Iranian government the whole of its records relative to scientific and technical data.” The risk for the British side was that other countries would follow suit and make claims in terms of national sovereignty, such as in Mexico. AIOC’s representation of its science and technology greatly underplayed the role of interruptions posed by local political communities and all the work and collaboration required to learn about the behavior of the oil. By placing at the center of the analysis the ways in which techniques of representing and standardizing oil accumulated, operated, and circulated at multiple sites in southwest Iran, Tehran, and London, I reveal that in practice, the powers of AIOC and the Iranian state were worked out within a specific and local history, precisely through the management of technical and scientific information about oil.