In February 2018, a parliamentary representative from the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan warned that Khuzestan would not exist in the next 20 years--referring to the rapid environmental degradation of the province due to water shortage, soil erosion, and petrochemical pollution, and the ensuing depopulation and mass out-migration. Six decades earlier, however, Khuzestan had been hailed as a land of “limitless potential,” constituting the “cradle” of Iran’s energy futures. These energy futures were to be realized through resource development projects centering around oil, water, and mechanized agriculture. Through an analysis of historical archives, photographs, and literary sources, this paper looks at the “politics and poetics” of large-scale infrastructural projects that coalesced around land, water, and oil in Khuzestan in pre-revolutionary Iran. These large-scale infrastructures include the expansion of petrochemical industries and dam construction for agricultural irrigation and electrification in Khuzestan. While located in the geographical margins of Iran, this paper locates Khuzestan as a key site for the formation of the nation-state. I argue that large-scale energy infrastructures in Iran remade nature and nation, and evoked contradictory and disjunctive imaginaries, affects, and visions of past, present, and future. The technonatural remaking of Iran’s “geo-body” in Khuzestan was thus central to the production of Iranian national modernity and reveals the material and symbolic forms and processes through which state power shapes and is manifested in everyday life. This socionatural transformation of Iran in the twentieth century through hydroelectric and hydrocarbon power mediated the relationship between the state and its subjects, and in turn shaped the experiences and expectations of national modernity.