Oilstream: Why hydrocarbons can’t be stopped (or so they say)

Abstract:

Oil comes packaged in a powerful, increasingly deadly jargon – and nowhere more so than in the petro-state of Trinidad and Tobago. Petroleum professionals speak of “upstream” and “downstream” as segments of an uninterruptable commodity chain. Such crustal-fluvial ideas took hold long before the science of climate change – even before the combustion of petroleum for mechanical purposes.  This presentation explores three moments of consensus on the inevitability of hydrocarbon flows.  The heaviest hydrocarbon came first.  At the turn of the 20^th century, Trinidad’s Asphalt Industry Commission described bitumen as visibly flowing but ultimately limited.  By the 1960s, this double accounting underwrote the entire global economy of petroleum.  Oil companies “prove up” an endowment of resources into marketable reserves.  I examine this discourse during crisis, beginning in 2009, when Trinidad considered the depletion of its oil and gas reserves.  The fluvial model made a course of action clear: discover more hydrocarbons and allow geo-economics to lift them.  Finally, in the third consensus, Trinidad’s leading independent oil producer turned the stream into a circle.  He designed and tested a means of injecting carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs to as to produce oil.  This enhanced form of oil recovery sequestered carbon underground – for the good of atmosphere –but ultimately expelled more into the atmosphere.  Again, the process appeared inevitable, even good for the environment.  Under the logic of streams, the oil was coming up anyway.  As a discourse then, the oilstream represents fossil fuels as unstoppable and irreplaceable – damn the consequences!  

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Roy Huijsmans