Tailings, Unconventional: Sedimented Horizons for More Equitable Energy Futures
Watch the one minute and three second video embedded above from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Weaving together a series of satellite images of the Athabasca oil sands each year from 1984 to 2016 as a kind of slideshow, the video documents the spread of activities by the agents and architects of Canada’s fossil economy over this thirty-two-year period. Now a common phrase in the energy humanities critical lexicon, a fossil economy describes an economy whose primary impetus is endless growth, which is made possible by the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil (Malm, 2013; Johnson 2019). Using identifying markers like “infrastructure,” “active mine,” and “tailings pond,” and, eventually, “reclaimed pond” in 2011, these forms of fossil capitalist, necropolitical terraforming are captured best by two intertwined terms, that is, expansion and intensification. Maybe this abstracted view offered by NASA satellites obscures the relative scale and severity of the oil sands’ impacts as much as it captures it, since the Athabasca River is rendered into another resource. But even this singular view from NASA reveals how in searching for examples of catastrophes of the present, one could do worse than turning to Alberta’s oil sands.
As the NASA video makes clear, the historical intensification of the oil sands project played out in the past decades not only in terms of industrial expansionism and increased production through more “active mines” and “infrastructure,” but also in terms of growing waste by-products that mark the landscape at similar scale, primarily in the form of tailings ponds. Aesthetically, the ponds register a kind of catastrophic beauty, as Edward Burtynsky has famously captured in his photography, which generates an affective impulse defined by what communications scholar Jennifer Peeples terms a “toxic sublime” (Peeples, 2011). No matter how off-putting, the toxic sublime shaped by the catastrophic condition of the ponds draws our collective interest and attention, like—to employ an overused simile—a car crash.
These tailings comprise water diverted from the Athabasca River, tainted by the refining process, and unable to be returned to the Athabasca’s flows. NASA’s series of posts as part of its Earth Observatory in which this video appears describes the motivation for its creation, which is to document a “World of Change.” “Change” is a curiously neutral descriptor for what is quite plainly a compounding social and ecological catastrophe. The write-up that follows the video dampens its critical impact by rehearsing the tired economy-versus-environment trope, reminding readers that while “some groups have labeled the oil sands an environmental menace,” it is the case that “they offer a stable source of energy and economic growth” (NASA, n.d.). Across the landscape of Northern Alberta, tailings ponds have rapidly spread in parallel with increased production, a kind of material unconscious of this process. With a volume of now over 1.4 trillion litres spanning roughly 300km2, there are currently 30 active ponds (Chow-Fraser and Rougeot, 2022). First established as a temporary solution, treating the tailings to be returned to the Athabasca was a built-in promise of the oil sands megaproject, but it remains an engineering problem yet to be solved. To make matters worse, the ponds have leaked since their inception—called “seepage” in industry jargon—and at their current scale are estimated to leak something like 11 million litres per day or 4 billion litres annually (Chow-Fraser and Rougeot, 2022). This scale of this catastrophic condition is a consequence of the material makeup of the resource itself. When undisturbed, the sands are stable as part of existing landscape and ecology. But when extracted and rendered into oil, the sands become an unconventional resource. Unconventional here signals those resources deemed to be not normal, pursued only under certain favourable economic circumstances in the present and future. As the International Energy Agency points out, what is understood to be unconventional might... shift since “over time, as economic and technological conditions evolve, resources hitherto considered unconventional can migrate into the conventional category” (IEA, n.d.).
Despite the term’s unfixed nature, unconventional oil is distinguished primarily by how hard it is extract and render usable, mediated as these states are by technological innovation. Such difficulty first plays out in terms of access to depths far below the Earth's surface and then in terms of the resources necessary for refining or upgrading the substance to materially resemble conventional oil. Difficulty as a signifier, then, carries some heavy semantic weight here, operating as a euphemism for a set of challenges that emerge when trying to unshackle usable bitumen from the sands. Unlike the sweet crudes that sit closely below the surface of lands and subsea found in places like the Niger Delta or Saudi Arabia, the bitumen of Alberta’s sands is more solid and located far deeper. Only as technologies were developed in the 1930s to separate bitumen from the clay to which it is fused, unconventional oil was brought into being. Fast forward to 2015 and unconventional oil has become so ubiquitous that a draft addition for the term unconventional in the Oxford English Dictionary has been proposed, reading: “[o]f a potential (hydrocarbon) fuel or source of energy: relatively difficult to exploit (compared to coal seams, oil fields, etc., previously exploited on a significant scale)” (“unconventional,” n.d.). Since production records continue to be broken each year, perhaps unconventional oil like Alberta’s oil sands is now conventional?
In Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014), architecture and design theorist Keller Easterling describes the latent tendencies present in objects primarily of the built environment such as infrastructures as dispositions (Easterling, 2014). If infrastructure plays a determinate role in shaping the contours of everyday life; so too does energy. Following Easterling’s more infrastructurally attuned theorization of dispositions, I would like to propose an energetic one that homes in on the interplay between potentialities, material conditions, and imaginaries that shape cultural narratives about oil for better or worse. Such energetic dispositions influence different political economies and ecologies on the one hand and horizons for the future on the other. In the Niger Delta, the easily accessible sweet crude bubbling up from the ground and around abandoned wells whose valves are called “Christmas trees”—named as such because of how their resemblance to the holiday decoration—has led to networks of illicit artisanal refining in which the rendered product is often sold back to locals. In one cultural narrative, refiners funded through cartel-like structures fuelled by black markets and corruption contribute to the further ecological degradation of a region already deemed a sacrifice zone in the planetary imagination. No doubt, the crude methods of refining are indeed ecologically destructive. Documentary photographer George Osodi’s series on the Niger Delta reveal this stark situation. In another cultural narrative, however, local refiners divert flows of oil from global fossil capital or merely tap into wells abandoned by those very same forces of fossil capital, then use a distilling process that Nigerian political theorist Cyril Obi said was akin to local, Indigenous gin distilling processes. Obi described this process when answering a question I posed at the Petrocultures 2022 conference in Norway’s oil capital, Stavanger, about the potential for artisanal refiners to be at the centre of energy transition. And just as British colonizers made gin production illegal in order to stoke dependency and hinder autonomy, he further pointed out, so too did multinational oil companies lock down the Niger Delta’s oil, reserving it for global markets as locals continue to experience ongoing energy poverty while sitting on some of the world’s largest reserves. Taking cues from this cultural narrative of energy autonomy that acknowledges sweet crude’s dispositions, it might make sense to leverage this decentralized network of oil production as a site first to fuel energy autonomy against the colonial expressions of fossil capital, as unconventional a move this may seem. In Alberta, however, the unconventional character of its oil reserves, only defined as such after unconventional oil was figured into global reserves as a kind of accounting trick, gave rise to a host of proprietary technologies and necessary resources to the degree that some view the oil sands not as a viable project in terms of resource extraction, but as a speculative one to develop new knowledge as a kind of capital in itself. As critical geographer Eliot Tretter observes in “Producing Alberta’s Tar Sands: Oil, Ideas, Rents, and New Enclosures,” the unique materiality of bitumen and its political economy has made the sands a site of a new “knowledge-production-transfer regime” more than merely a site of material resource extraction (Tretter, 2020). Artisanal refining or some vision of distributed sovereign production, in other words, isn’t really possible in Alberta given the nature of the oil sands and the tailings ponds catastrophe, but other unconventional actions that account for the oil sands’s unique disposition are possible. Dispositions, then, demand a different politics, dictated as they might be by substance, materiality, region, or other factors. And these diverse dispositions highlight how the unconventional could serve as a guiding praxis for more equitable post-oil futures.
What would it do to refigure the unconventional as a disposition itself that underwrites a post-oil future—to release the unconventional from its technoscientific shackles to develop an expansive politics around it instead? The standard dictionary definition of unconventional offers some hints: “Not limited or bound down by convention; free and easy” (“unconventional,” n.d.). In a short entry on the limits of actually existing reclamation of post-extractive landscapes and its possible emancipatory horizons written for the Environmental Humanities journal’s Living Lexicon, Jacob Goessling and I approached reclamation with a similar impulse. Against and beyond the rather technoscientific process that define actually existing reclamation and further rationalize catastrophes such as the tailings ponds I opened this contribution with, we approached reclamation as a mode of praxis, reclamation also carries with it emancipatory potential to, for instance, inform Land Back (Goessling and Kinder, forthcoming). Land Back describes efforts return lands back to Indigenous peoples, especially those across Turtle Island, or what is commonly known today as North America, given that the US and Canada in particular remain settler states whose modes of resource extraction reproduce settler colonial relations.
Refiguring the unconventional might activate similar emancipatory potentials by informing actions and dispositions that refuse and resist the logics and behaviours of extractive, fossil capital on the one hand and more conventional liberal environmentalisms that see promise in green capitalism on the other. In the Niger Delta, a politics of the unconventional may mean formalizing the illicit, decentralized networks of artisanal refining to plant the infrastructural seeds for energy futures otherwise. In Alberta, unconventional praxis might manifest in simply shutting the whole project down and giving Land Back, since the oil sands continue to operate on and damage stolen land. While not solving the problem of tailings, unconventional actions informed by unconventional dispositions promise to at least halt their further spread and saturation while charting a future path against catastrophe.
Bibliography
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Goessling, Jacob, and Jordan B. Kinder. Reclamation. Environmental Humanities 15, no. 2 (2023): forthcoming.
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Johnson, Bob. Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. Baltimore (Maryland): Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
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