Cold Water Oil

Offshore Petroleum Cultures

Fiona Polack, Danine Farquharson, Fiona Polack, Danine Farquharson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367903923
• eBook ISBN: 9781000516661
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures is a collection of essays examining how societies conceive of fossil fuel extraction in the inhospitable but fragile waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

What happens offshore matters. Currently, over a quarter of the world's oil and gas is produced from beneath the seas. The offshore petroleum industry is thus a crucial point of origin for global carbon emissions, and other environmental harms. Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures illuminates ignored histories, influential contemporary narratives, and emerging energy and environmental futures. The volume centres on North Atlantic and Arctic regions; the continuing but often strongly contested pursuit of oil and gas in frigid, tumultuous, and environmentally sensitive seas enforces the lengths to which corporations and governments will go to maintain the centrality of fossil fuels. The book's contributors focus on the cultural, social, and ecological implications of oil and gas extraction in the oceanic territories of Canada, Norway, the UK, Russia, the US, and the Iñupiat of Alaska at a time of profound global uncertainty. In conversation with the energy and environmental humanities, and critical ocean studies, Cold Water Oil considers a region central to debates about climate change and the planet's future.

Cold Water Oil engages students and researchers interested in climate change, energy humanities, critical ocean studies, and North Atlantic and Arctic issues.

1 HEADING OFFSHORE Introducing cold water oil

Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003024125-1

As we write, in the autumn of 2021, the world remains in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the past year and a half of recurrent lockdowns and surging infection rates, the need for action to address the climate crisis became intertwined with a sharper awareness of the instability of global capitalism, the differing abilities of political leaders and global industries to respond to catastrophic threats, and the very real capacity of the nonhuman to overwhelm the human. Early hopes that travel bans, stay-at-home orders, and economic slowdowns might at least have the silver lining of reducing global carbon emissions in a meaningful way have proved premature (Tollefson 2021). Nonetheless, many have at least learned that it is possible to radically alter the way they live and work, particularly when it comes to circumscribing CO₂-producing travel.¹ Whether the will exists to make such changes permanent is another matter. Also still unclear is whether governments around the world will take the opportunity offered by COVID-related uncertainties to rebuild less carbon-intensive economies and societies. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Green Recovery Database, which monitors COVID-19 recovery plans in 43 countries, noted that as of April 2021, environmentally positive spending measures were on par with environmentally detrimental ones (OECD 2021).

That the stakes are high, and the situation is urgent, is unquestionable. The United Nations (UN)’s 2020 Emissions Gap Report notes that “failure to significantly reduce global emissions by 2030 will make it impossible to keep global warming below 1.5° C” (United Nations Environment Program 2020, xi). Government and corporate decision-making in the wake of the pandemic will have significant ramifications for the long-term fate of the planet. It will also, inevitably, have consequences for energy industries. Oil and gas companies are under mounting pressure to circumscribe their activities, and their offshore operations are in an especially tenuous position.² As Scott Carpenter notes, current economic challenges “could mean that a growing share of the world’s oil production is pumped from cheaper onshore alternatives, rather than pricey offshore ones” (Carpenter 2020). Moreover, growing public demands to respond to the climate crisis have already seen some countries ban further offshore oil expansion altogether. Denmark recently cancelled all future licensing rounds for oil and gas exploration and production in its sector of the North Sea and resolved to end all offshore fossil fuel production by 2050 (Lepic 2020). Those decisions followed earlier similar moves by New Zealand (Graham-McLay 2018). In their Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, the International Energy Agency (IEA) clearly and forcefully directs policy makers that there “is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway,” and the roadmap describes that beyond “projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development” (IEA 2021, 21, emphasis ours). Meanwhile, other nations that extract oil and gas from beneath the ocean, including Norway and Canada, scramble to rebrand their petroleum products as “greener” than those produced in other places by other methods (see Ryggvik, and Dale and Farquharson, this volume).

What happens offshore matters. Currently, more than a quarter of the world’s oil and a rapidly growing proportion of gas are produced from beneath the seas (IEA 2018, 15). The offshore fossil fuel industry is, thus, a crucial point of origin for carbon emissions, as well as other environmental harms.³ Notwithstanding this significance, humanities and social science scholars have so far made only sporadic efforts to comprehend the socio-cultural discourses that attend its operations.⁴ As we have argued elsewhere, powerful imaginaries related to offshore petroleum extraction are invariably embroiled in long-standing conceptions of the sea (Polack and Farquharson 2017). Hence, this scholarly inattention, particularly by academics in the Global North, may be partially attributed to entrenched cultural narratives that position oceanic spaces as aqua nullius. As Tricia Cusack puts it, “Western conceptions of the ocean [have] continued to view it predominantly as ‘empty space,’ although it [has] remained a space available for exploration and appropriation” (Cusack 2014, 1).⁵ This consideration is abetted by the fact that offshore petroleum extraction typically occurs well out of sight of land and within a context of deliberately cultivated corporate secrecy (see Macdonald this volume, and Polack 2019). The relative dearth of humanities and social science research about offshore oil extends to the interdisciplinary formations with which we most explicitly engage in this volume: the environmental and the energy humanities.

Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures thus delves into overlooked histories, influential contemporary narratives, and emerging energy and environmental futures associated with offshore petroleum extraction. To focus our efforts, we pay special attention to industrial operations in the North Atlantic and Arctic, operations that are often entangled as nations such as Norway and Russia, with already well-established petroleum industries in the North Atlantic, seek to expand their operations in Arctic seas. As Julie Sze correctly notes, “as long as complex environmental problems are multiscalar across space and time, scale will remain a key conceptual tool in interdisciplinary environmental studies” (Sze 2016). Thinking about oil and its effects in geographically and environmentally delimited contexts makes it easier to perceive its complex influences and to better identify the narratives and mythologies that accompany its extraction and consumption. We see climate crisis-induced urgency in attending specifically to the region of cold water oil.

Cold water oil

Northern cold water oceans contain both well-established petroleum operations (in the Beaufort Sea, and on the Grand Banks, for instance) as well as fledgling and aspirational ones (such as around Svalbard and the Lofoten/Vesterålen/Senja Archipelago). The continuing pursuit of oil and gas in what we call the cold water offshore constitutes an extreme yet highly revealing example of the lengths to which corporations and governments have been prepared to go in order to maintain the centrality of fossil fuels. Cold water oil reserves in the North Atlantic and Arctic constitute a classic instance of what Stephanie LeMenager, borrowing from Michael T. Klare, terms “tough oil” (LeMenager 2014, 3). These deposits are typically located in frigid and tumultuous seas within ecologically sensitive and isolated environments. Ironically, the temptation to expand activities in “what may be the last large conventional oil frontier on earth” (Harriss 2016, 18)⁶ grows as climate change’s cryospheric and meteorological jolts increasingly impact the area. The Arctic has already seen climatic elevations two to three times greater than the global average (Abram et al. 2019; Barry and Hall-McKim 2018), and diminishing sea ice is now making navigation easier and extensive summer exploratory ventures more viable. However, the ramifications of rapid climate change in the cold water offshore extend in many nonhuman and human directions beyond the opening of newly navigable waters. These implications range from the endangerment of species such as ringed seals and polar bears, whose habitats are disappearing, to the growing “Atlantification” of Arctic oceans as the seas of the cold water offshore become increasingly indistinguishable (Csapó et al. 2021), to cultural disruption and ecological grief in Indigenous communities (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018; Watt-Cloutier 2015). Growing awareness of the fragility of Arctic ecosystems and the disastrous impacts associated with climate change means that garnering social license to exploit oil and gas reserves in the region is now much more difficult. The area has become absolutely central to debates about the planet’s future.⁷

While its resources fall primarily under the jurisdiction of European and North American nations in the Global North,⁸ exploration and extraction in the cold water offshore often have the most disruptive effects in socio-economically, and in the case of Indigenous communities also racially, marginalized locations within these countries. Close attention to the cold water offshore by necessity draws us into the task of complicating the term “North” and grappling with the ongoing legacies of colonialism and uneven development within wealthy, energy- hungry societies. We share Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin’s belief that North is “not a single, definable concept” and it is “difficult to say where North begins on a map” (Jørgensen and Sörlin 2014, 4, 12). We also agree with Ray and Maier that there is a long and troubled history of Western conceptions of the North marginalizing the perspectives of Indigenous peoples for whom the North is home, rather than peripheral to southern romantic and/or resource extraction fantasies (Ray and Maier 2017, 1). As Inuk visual artist and critic asinnajaq explains: “too much of the language around Inuit is about the ‘isolation,’ the ‘remoteness,’ the idea of being disconnected” (asinnajaq 2019). Perceptions of the North and Northern oceans as frontiers add “immensely to colonial narratives of indigeneity and nation” (Ray and Maier 2017, 1) and are often readily identifiable within the rhetoric of the contemporary fossil fuel industry.

Cold Water Oil considers offshore oil industrial development in and across the oceanic territories of Canada, N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Heading offshore: introducing cold water oil
• 2 “We are torn about our future”: Big Oil and Iñupiaq community health in Arctic Alaska
• 3 Encountering the nonhuman in North Atlantic oil catastrophes
• 4 Dynamic positioning: North Sea petroculture’s backwash
• 5 The call of Cthoilu: the weird subject of cold water oil
• 6 Contested and emergent futures: film and energy regimes of the Newfoundland offshore
• 7 Dispatches from two cold water oil cultures: Norway and Newfoundland and Labrador
• 8 Art and the offshore
• 9 Time for oil: competing petrotemporalities in Norway’s Lofoten/Vesterålen/Senja Archipelago
• 10 From land to polar sea: Russia’s ill-starred quest for a new petroleum province in the Arctic offshore
• 11 Svalbard and oil: dangerous games in the Arctic?
• 12 Raw, dense, and loud: a whale’s perspective on cold water energy
• Index