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- Convenors:
-
Zeynep Oguz
(University of Edinburgh)
Pauline Destree (Durham University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Taking “after oil” as an ethnographic object, this panel examines how various actors plan for, imagine or seek to defer the end of oil. It critically explores the life worlds taking place after oil to highlight contradictions and alternative possibilities of energy transitions.
Long Abstract:
What will it take to transition societies beyond oil? While recent reports indicate a peak in fossil fuel demand by 2030 (IEA 2023), the granting of new oil and gas exploration licenses across the globe suggest an expansion of petro-assemblages that contravene pledges to net zero. A recent report by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UNEP suggests that the misalignment gap between countries’ targets under the Paris Agreement and fossil fuel production is growing alarmingly as the world’s largest oil and gas producers plan on long-term increases in production until 2050 (SEI et al, 2023). In this panel, we take “life after oil” as an ethnographic object to explore the contradictions of energy transitions at a time of deep uncertainties around energy futures and taken-for-granted declarations of a post-oil transition. We ask: how do companies, professionals, communities, politicians, workers and the public plan for and imagine the end of oil – or seek to defer it? When does “after oil” start: with the depletion of reserves, their economic or technical unviability, their moral condemnation, or else? What do post-oil economies, livelihoods, and infrastructures look like? What alternatives do they make possible, what challenges do they face? What will the end of oil undo, what will it keep intact? Whose visions come to matter? In asking these questions, the panel will explore the life worlds reassembled “after oil” and contribute to a greater understanding of the contradictions and challenges of energy transitions in the Global South and the Global North.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Anna Bettini (University of Calgary)
Paper short abstract:
Recent discussions on Alberta's changing energy landscape, a central hub for oil and gas in Canada, unveil both progress and uncertainties for fossil fuel workers and rural communities. This paper examines the current challenges within its energy landscape, reflecting on the future of oil and gas.
Paper long abstract:
Alberta, recognized as the epicentre of Canada's energy sector, is amidst a profound transformation intricately shaped by economic, cultural, and environmental dynamics. The province's identity is deeply interwoven with fossil fuels, particularly the extraction of oil and gas, which has left an indelible mark on its economy and societal fabric. Recent challenges, including plummeting prices, pipeline disputes, and workforce uncertainties, have cast shadows over this sector. As the Canadian government embraces a net-zero carbon emissions target by 2050, the industry faces an inevitable decline, posing a potential risk of displacement for hundreds of thousands of workers.
Concurrently, Alberta is witnessing a significant shift towards renewable energy, marked by substantial solar and wind project investments. This transition not only opens avenues for new job opportunities and economic growth but also extends positive impacts to local communities. This paradigm shift is complex, sparking debates around land use, environmental preservation, and community socio-economic repercussions.
In early August 2023, Premier Danielle Smith's announcement of a six-month moratorium on all renewable energy projects, spanning wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal developments, has cast a dense fog of uncertainty over Alberta's energy future. This temporary pause, aimed at addressing the concerns of landowners and farmers, holds the promise of reviewing construction policies, evaluating their impact on the power grid, and devising decommissioning protocols.
This paper draws from ethnographic interviews to explore the intricate balance of transitioning to cleaner energy, emphasizing strategies for environmental stewardship and community livelihoods in the "after oil and gas" world.
David Bond (Bennington College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on an ongoing fight to close a massive refinery in the US Virgin Islands. This fight productively centers the imperial energy networks of the United States in questions of who is working to end oil as if their life depended on it and who is profiting from the destruction.
Paper long abstract:
St. Croix stands at a climate crucible. For 50 years, a mammoth oil refinery underwrote the economy on this US outpost in the Caribbean before closing abruptly in 2012. The refinery was rushed back online in 2019 to disastrous effect – “The Island Where It Rains Oil,” ran the Washington Post headline – only to file for bankruptcy. Today, the aftershocks of fossil fuels— whether in an extensive legacy of toxic pollution or in the rising fury of superstorms—threaten life on St. Croix. Facing up to these challenges is a costly affair, and many worry over how to build a future that can rise above the throes of petro-capitalism. Backed by pedigreed expertise, one plan gains momentum: heavily subsidize the rebooting of the refinery in the hope of bending the fiscal properties of fossil fuels into new investments in climate resiliency. For many civic groups and residents, such a plan seems the very definition of foolhardy. Battered and bruised by the environmental properties of fossil fuels, citizens demand a forceful break with the refinery to secure a more sustainable future today. The situation in St. Croix raises a crucial conundrum many of us are beginning to inhabit: Just how does oil end?
To venture an answer, this paper draws on 4 years of working with residents to close the refinery. This story is instructive on just how difficult the great transformation away from fossil fuels may prove to be, even when there is popular enthusiasm for just such a revolution.
Antonio Maria Pusceddu (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the “dispute” over the oil industry in Portugal, the paper explores visions of national sovereignty, economic nationalism and climate internationalism, and how they are variously enacted in the struggles around the un/doing of post-oil futures.
Paper long abstract:
In December 2020, the Galp multinational company announced the closure of one of the two oil refineries operating in Portugal. The closure of the “northern” refinery was presented as part of a wider corporate strategy to improve the environmental standards of the only remaining refinery in the south, thus claiming an active role in the “decarbonization” of the economy. The company’s unilateral decision was met with mild protest from the government, while labour unions objected to the gradual dismantling of the national production infrastructure with the cover-up of the energy transition. The following year, the Portuguese climate justice movement staged an attempt to block the southern refinery, to press for an acceleration of the post-carbon transition. Labour unions mobilized discourses of national sovereignty to defend workers’ livelihoods and against transnational corporate interests, while the climate movement claimed a radical climate internationalism against the fossil industry. This paper discusses how struggles around the un/making of oil economies are entangled with national imaginaries, transnational realities and economic nationalism, and how they cope with the unequal relations of the global oil industry. Focusing on the “dispute” over the last oil refinery in Portugal, the paper explores notions of national sovereignty and climate internationalism, and how they are variously enacted in the un/doing of post-oil futures.
Pauline Destree (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
What happens when resource frontiers 'fail'? This paper explores the changing value of oil in the aftermath of an oil rush in Ghana, and the alternative economic futures that the anticipation of the end of oil brings about.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore the changing value of oil amid an aborted oil rush in Ghana. As one of the new African oil producers following the commercial exploitation of offshore discoveries in 2010, Ghana’s pursuit of oil has been marred by a series of crises that have precipitated the early decline of the industry. Despite popular perceptions and official projections of oil’s abundance, there are signs that the oil boom anticipated since the discoveries in 2007 will not materialize. As the futurity of oil at a time of environmental crisis is put into question, new expectations, hopes and fears emerge about what the end of oil might herald. In Takoradi, Ghana’s new Oil City, workers formerly employed in the logistics’ sector of the industry are disillusioned with oil’s failed promises and speak of a return to agriculture and services oriented toward longevity, stability, and the domestic economy. This paper explores their career trajectories and their attempts to secure livelihoods and reimagine life after oil. I describe these post-oil economic activities as a political project to re-establish “economies of sustenance” that foreground life-sustaining capacities (food, family, and friendship networks) and move beyond the extractive logic of the oil industry.
Anselm Kizza-Besigye
Paper short abstract:
The temporalities of extraction are making themselves felt in Uganda. What does it mean to stake an uncertain future on the sedimented remains of the past? In a time of energy transitions, what does a liveable future look like from a resource frontier in the Global South?
Paper long abstract:
As Uganda prepares to become Africa’s newest oil exporter, the anticipation of oil revenues and their attendant risks and promises are already reorienting Ugandans toward their pasts and imagined futures. Oil wealth promises to address dependence, precarity, and underdevelopment, shoring up Uganda’s undermined sovereignty. Yet, extraction poses ecological and social risks, rooted in histories of abandonment, dispossession, and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, there’s a sense that Uganda’s oil is belated, arriving, as it does, many decades after its discovery, in the era of “green” or “just" transitions. Drawing on the literature on the promises of oil (Adunbi, 2015; Gledhill, 2008; Apter, 2005; Coronil, 1997) and resource temporalities (Barlow, 2023; Weszkalnys, 2016; Limbert, 2010), this paper will argue that the anticipation of oil is remaking past and future in Uganda and other new oil frontiers in the Global South. In a bleak time, when the future seems foreclosed and millenarian faiths have gone mainstream, a doubtful hope appears on the receding horizon of a burning planet. In the present, the ground must be readied if this dream is to become reality. However, this entails an investment in the past, both as the source of claims to the benefits of extraction–nationally and within the oil-exporting Albertine region–and as the realm of wounds and historical grievances. In thinking through these temporalities, I will consider the perverse backwardness of energy transitions, whose dirty work is going on in the Global South–along new resource frontiers and in the equally extractive zones of conservation and carbon offsetting.
Julia Schwab (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper delves into the challenges of post-oil transition in and beyond the Ecuadorian Amazon, a post-colonial context marked by historical and geopolitical dependencies. It explores future visions of state, private, Indigenous and civil society actors based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2021.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the challenges of transitioning towards a post-oil life in and beyond the Ecuadorian Amazon. It emphasizes the historical-relational and geopolitical dependencies within the post-colonial context, along with internal hurdles in moving away from an oil-based development model. Using an assemblage approach, the study analyzes numerous overlapping and interconnected processes, investigating the future visions and aspirations of state, private, Indigenous, and civil society actors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork since 2021, special attention is given to the persisting structures created by oil rents, which appear to have a lasting impact on the future – almost “sticking” to it – and the discursive contradictions emerging from this phenomenon. The paper further explores the possibilities arising from Indigenous self-determination over ancestral territories and the Amazon rainforest's unique role in global climate change mitigation, moving beyond a mere structuralist argument. By addressing these inquiries, the paper contributes to understanding the complex and contradictory dynamics of post-oil transitions in the Amazon, as well as the enduring influence of oil-related imaginaries in local life worlds.
David Schröter (Université de Lausanne (UNIL))
Paper short abstract:
In order to transition beyond oil, mining of precious minerals is necessary and usually follows traditional patterns. This paper explores ethnographically how in Bolivia Lithium mining is seen as an opportunity for industrialisation, while mirroring familiar forms of fossil-fuel era extractivism.
Paper long abstract:
For almost two decades royalties generated from natural gas have formed one of the principal pillars of the Bolivian national economy. Gas reserves now growing scarce, Lithium promises a way out of impending national and international crises, as it is also needed for the transition to greener energy futures, coveted for supposedly making possible mobility without carbon fuels.
In Bolivia, Lithium extraction was supposed to be different. Grassroot organizations proposed it become a state industry, benefitting not just a chosen few, but the nation at large. Accepting their proposal, the government has developed an ambitious vision of lithium industrialisation based on the principles of national sovereignty and re-distribution of resources. Lithium was to save the world from its dependance on fossil fuels, and Bolivia from the historical paradigm of being a site of extraction while reaping hardly any its benefits.
However, after over 15 years, Lithium is still not extracted on an industrial scale, and faced with the urgency of the impending crises the country has called for foreign companies to propose new ways of extracting Lithium from the brines of the Uyuni salt flat. So, is Lithium mining just “business as usual” in a world which is supposedly undergoing a “just transition” towards greener futures?
Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with different regional grassroots organizations this paper will explore local engagement with the lithium extraction process at the Salar de Uyuni.
Michelle Geraerts (University of Amsterdam, Worlds of Lithium ERC)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologically following the afterlife of EV batteries ('the new oil') in Norway, this paper focuses on an industrial area that is known for its ‘clean’ processes and its proximity to a nature reserve. Situating the circular economy shows its embeddedness in messy environments and relations.
Paper long abstract:
Norway, the world’s frontrunner in electric passenger vehicles per capita, is well on its way to phasing out new sales of fossil fuel combustion cars by 2025. In this context, there is a growing need for social scientific reflections on lithium batteries—the central technology driving this ‘green mobility shift’. Anthropologically tracing the afterlife of electric car batteries through Norway led me to a place called Øra. In this industrial area, renowned as the ‘capital of the circular economy’, spent car batteries are prepared for recycling by being shredded into a black mass, a mixture of metals that is both toxic and economically promising. Despite its now circular character, the industrial area has historically threatened the flourishing of surrounding wetlands. In 1979, Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland drew a line on a map of Øra to limit industrial expansion into the adjacent nature reserve. This line materialises today as a hiking path, delineating the realm of economic activity from the ecological diversity of the wetlands. However stable the line appears on the map, a combination of ethnographic and artistic research methods complicates the paradoxical reality of this place and challenges the notion that ‘Nature has her own cycle,’ distinct from that of the circular economy. By engaging with the emic notion of the battery as ‘the new oil,’ this paper demonstrates how it transcends being a mere bounded or isolated techno-economic object, revealing, through its many complex relations, the limits and omissions of dominant imaginaries surrounding the circular economy and energy transition.
Amarilli Varesio (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
The study follows lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries' circulation, repair, repurposing and recycling patterns in Uganda to unveil how batteries as discarded resources produce both “a “mundane infrastructure” of energy poverty” (Cholez, 2019), but also a new environmental challenge.
Paper long abstract:
With the ambition to be at the forefront of global climate action, the Ugandan government is promoting investments in e-mobility and lithium-ion battery production to reduce dependence on energy imports. At the same time, in 2025, Uganda will begin extracting oil from Lake Albert to finance the energy transition, as stated by the Minister of Energy.
Beyond ambiguous political statements, the space of "transition" occupied by low-income communities in Uganda sees low-cost, and often second-hand, lead-acid batteries as critical in shaping the post-grid urban areas, where access to privatized electricity infrastructure is often too high for most of the population. But the thriving Ugandan market promoting solar energy and e-mobility poses similar challenges related to the generation of growing amounts of waste, which is a largely ignored environmental problem (Baraille, Jaglin, 2022).
Expanding on the work of Kasper about storage as infrastructure (2023), in the city of Gulu and Kampala, the study explores the repurposing of second hand lead-acid car batteries from used imported vehicles, their repair in local workshops and the management of spent lithium ion batteries from European e-cars for domestic energy storage.
In conclusion, a look to batteries' circulation, repair, repurposing and recycling patterns in Uganda unveils how batteries as discarded resources produce both “a “mundane infrastructure” of energy poverty” (Cholez, 2019), but also a new environmental challenge, and how the old geopolitics of transferring waste in countries lacking recycling facilities for new e-waste unveil the relations of toxic capitalism in which the energy transition is embedded.
Ahmad Sultan (Cyprus International University) Nihal Soganci (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
In response to energy crises, this study delves into the compelled transition away from oil within the Lebanese community. We explore creative tactics born out of necessity while highlighting inherent contradictions and consequential errors, offering insights into a potential future without oil.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2019, Lebanon has faced significant challenges, marked by state default on public debt, resulting in widespread repercussions across the financial, societal, and infrastructural sectors. The Lebanese lira depreciated by 95%, the banking system teeters on collapse with frozen foreign currency accounts and increasing widespread poverty and precarity. Central Bank-imposed fuel import quotas have exacerbated power cuts, with national electricity grid supplying an average of 2-3 hours daily electricity, with a total blackout for two days in October 2021. (Chaplain & Verdeil,2023). Despite diesel generators supplying 84% of households in 2018(CAS, 2008; 2020), leading to what is often called “generator mafia”, the high costs have spurred a surge in a “patchwork” renewable energy sector, particularly through the increase of makeshift solar panel installations that one may even find provided by minimarkets. On this line, we will explore how the renewable energy sector is collaged and adapted amidst the country's crisis. The "patchers," comprised of less-experienced technicians who claim to comprehend the operational principles, regrettably proceed to implement unlicensed and substandard solar systems marketed as “cheaper” alternatives. Thus, in this paper through exploring how renewable energy practices are manipulated and adapted when access to oil has become highly limited, we offer a glimpse into how life without oil may come to be without the required infrastructure, transition process and financial and technical capabilities.