Returning a fossil to the ground
Retruning a Fossil to the Ground is the accumulation of sticky and uncomfortably personal investigations, field trips and a domestication of the Brockham Oil Field in Surrey. It was meant to be a critical analysis of how cultural and political narratives are manifesting such a site of the Anthropocene but continually insisted on breaking from this genre, wandering in and out of it. In the course of my visits to the site, it became more undeniable that there is a complex, problematic entanglement of my own body and habitus, my desires and nostalgia at work in such an infrastructural site.
This somewhat unnerving notion, the collapse of the separation between the industrial and the intimate, together with a frustration about the lack of available methods to enter the subsurface, both physically and discursive have accumulated in a practice which seeks to work through this mesh of the contemporary moment and its materiality.Using a method on the thresholds of fiction, interpretation of geological data, and experimental photography, my practice seeks to open a space of exploring what it feels like to live in late capitalism, at the end of the world (as we know it) while simultaneously never defining this space itself fully. Working at the intersection of practiced fine art and critical theory, this project seeks to make use of the unique potential of two different epistemologies informing each other and lending each other a critical eye without seeking to resolve the other.
What follows is a field report from the Brockham Oil Field:
There is a village, a street, bushes and scrub, a farm, a path, CCVT, back to the bushes and scrub and then fields, flat fields and a forest in the distance. There are train tracks, but I only know this from consulting the map, I cannot see them. Someone is keeping bees. Eyes back on the path, and then a fence, a gate. Gabble, a rampart, like a fortress. An embankment, bend outwards.And then the forest and the field of birds and wild poultry, hidden away behind narrow, short trees. There are rose hips growing here. I want to plug them and make jam the way my grandmother taught me, but I don’t know if it is wise to eat them? Is this site contaminated? Are its grounds ruined? What about the farmland around it, the dry, cracked fields? The first time I came, I hid in the nearby woodlot. I couldn’t see anything from there, my view was blocked by an embankment built to keep out curious on-lookers (?) There was a trailer outside the gate and I couldn’t tell if it was occupied and if the occupants would be there to keep out curious onlookers as well. But as I couldn’t see anyone or any movement at all, I came closer and climbed up the embankment. After reading about fracking for so long, I needed to see it with my own eyes, but here was nothing:
Large green cylinders; Silver metal pipes; A red hydrant; Bright blue canisters (the same ones my grandfather would use), matt corrugated sheets and white, milky plastic held by an iron grid. And a car. But no human in sight. I decided it would be best to come here on Sundays.
There is Oil in the Weald Basin!
The Weald Basin formed about 300 million years ago when the Lower Permian period followed the Carboniferous period. It was warmer then on earth than it is now, mainly due to extraordinary volcanic activity - so I read. There were no mammals on the planet then. The large continent was then called Pangea and it was the product of a forceful collision - an event called the Variscan Orogeny. Over the period of 125 million years, several rifts would form the Weald Basin.
And then there was oil.
When organic decay is buried under sediments, isolated from oxygen, and subjected to great pressure and heat, kerogen gets formed. Kerogen releases hydrocarbons when heated up. The quality of kerogen varies greatly, depending on the levels of oxygen present in its creation. But roughly it goes like this:
Fulvic acids + humic acids + humin -> H20 + CO2 + ammonia + geopolymers
The absence of oxygen is crucial in the formation of hydrocarbons. If there is too much oxygen, bacteria will eat up the organic matter before it can go through this process. Fossil fuels can usually be found layered in a source rock. Such rocks are usually limestone or shale rock. In German, we call the source rock “Muttergestein”, mother stone. The right to extract oil from the subsurface at the Brockham Oil field is held in the licence PL235. Angus Energy holds 65% of the license, other shareholders are Terrain Energy, Brockham Capital and Alba. It was BP who first discovered the well and since 1987, petroleum has been sourced from the Portland Sandstone. BRX2Y is the name of this well. Another well, BRX4Z was drilled into the Kimmeridge Clay in 2017 in order to access unconventional oil, “tight oil”, through fracking. Though drilled, the well is still in its testing phase.
Interlude:
But more now on the Motherstone: The Motherstone occurs as a rock formation which holds trapped reserves of petroleum within them. This petroleum, the ‘tight oil’ is much more difficult to reach and extract (National Geographics 2021). Hence, fracking with its micro-explosions is needed to force the rocks to open and let out its captives. There are reports of people living above the ground near fracking sites who have felt regular tremors, their bodies now involuntarily swinging with the rhythms of the extraction.
But how long would it take until I become part of the reserves in the Weald Basin? Would I have to bury my body and how much pressure would be required? Would a change in climate be needed for a successful transformation? How quickly would my body have to be covered in water as it decays? And what would be the qualities of the kerogen of my body once it is completely compressed? Which kind of shale would I turn into?
That depends on the mineral content. There is carbon-rich shale, full of carbonate minerals such as calcite. But this is mainly found in marine life, life that depends on shells for protection. But there is a small amount of calcite in the human ear. Siliceous shale is rich in silicon dioxide, which mainly stems from organisms which have silica in their cell wall or skeleton. There is some silica in human bones as well. Cannel shale was formed in swamps and is mainly made from stems and robust plants.
One day I laid down and closed my eyes and never opened them again, now I am waiting to turn into oil.
Maybe my positioning, in the dirt in the nearby forest, in the little swamp below the embankment, on the rock pile outside the gate or the field next to the site would influence the quality of my decomposed organic material and its definitive reappearance as oil. I will sink into the ground, slowly becoming weathered, slowly coming undone. Heat and pressure will work me deeper into the ground. I will wait here patiently to get extracted, perhaps, one day.
CHAPTER 2: MY ROCK COMPANION
The transitional object was first described by Donald Winnicott as an object, usually soft like a blanket for example, which enabled the young child to shift from the phase of oral relationship with the mother to the next phase of object-relationships (2017).
I know now that you are a flint.
Flint is one of the rocks whose origin cannot yet be fully explained.
It formed in the sea and is made of organic matter, silica.
Flint can at once carry fossils inside of it and is itself a fossil.
If my rock is a transitional object - from one love to another, one paradigm to another, losing a world and moving into an entirely new one - it is a very cruel one. It embodies continuous anthropogenic geological processes which should not happen in the midst of a climate crisis. The transition we are confronted with communally as a society is to move into a post-petrocapitalist mode of living, detach ourselves from the source rock, the mother stone. The transitional object, the flint stone lets us touch what it is we are leaving behind while also offering a softness, in intimately feeling our geological entanglement, it might even stimulate feelings of care and empathy - but it is hard to let go. And it is hard at the same time, to be visually reminded of the urgency to let go.
Another reason why this object might be overwhelming, is the same reason why it is overwhelming at times to think or speak of the climate climate crisis: they are Hyperobjects (Morton 2013). Hyperobjects in their sheer scale (in time and dimension) escape our thinking and modes of representation while at the same time deeply defining life on earth. Consider the fossil fuel industry for example: though there is a scientific formula to it and specific mechanisms surrounding the extraction which can be traced and documented, fossil fuels themselves escape this frame, they reach far into the past and into the future.
We are a species that outliving itself and constantly (over-) stretching the time frame of our existence - both our lived existence and the traces thereof. We might ourselves be Hyperobjects. We stretch out as the market expands, in a matter we don’t witness similarly in natural environments. We take a long deep breath in, expanding the lungs without an exhale of relief. The Hyperobjects surrounding us might hide in plain sight but they do make their presence known in uncomfortable, disruptive ways - and they are sticky.
This seems like a good moment in time to pick up a rock companion and let its unsettling presence linger while holding it dearly and bravely.
CHAPTER 3: YOU CANNOT ENTER THE SUBSURFACE
When one wants to travel into the ground, one must be aware of the following: Humans have never left their mark on the subsurface of the earth beyond the Earth’s crust which is 5km - 75km thick. The mantle is 2,890 km wide and wraps itself around the core with a radius of about another 3,400 km. The outer core is said to be liquid and the inner one made of solid iron. It is believed to contain the same heat from back when the earth first formed. It is extremely difficult to recreate the conditions, the pressure, tem-perature and radiation, of the earth’s core in a scientific model, and hence, much remains the object of speculation. My favorite theory is by Professor Kei Hirose from Tokyo Tech who suspects that there might be a forest of crystals at the centre of the earth with all crystals pointing to the north pole (Science X 2017).
The deepest hole ever drilled by humanity, that we know of, is the Kola Superdeep Borehole at 12,26km. Kola Superdeep Borehole is located in the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, The Peninsula is a Tundra eco-system: it is extremely cold and windy in this landscape and its inhabitants must be tough and sturdy. Most plants use rock openings as shelter against the harsh conditions. Life is precarious in the Kola Peninsula but its inhabit-ants have adapted and might almost flourish after ancient evolutionary pro-cesses. Changes in the climate will mean that one ecosystem will replace another and this can be watched in real time in the tundra.
In the middle of this bare landscape, a soviet research centre was erected and drilling began in the spring 1970, which means planning must have begun already in the middle of the space race in the preceding years. It took the Soviet engineers twenty years to drill the hole. The extreme temperatures made it difficult, as equipment would simply melt. Financially, it literally became a bottomless pit and the project slowly fell apart as the Soviet Union dissolved as well. What is left of the site and the borehole are the decaying ruins of the station. In the rubble, surrounded by debris is a rusty, inconspicuous round plate with big metal bolts covering the deepest hole on earth. It cannot even be made out on Google Earth. The borehole has never reached its goal - the mantle from which it hoped to recover samples; it ended up resting in the crust, having mastered only about 0,03% of the distance to the Earth’s very core.
As the project came to an end, on the other side of the iron curtain, rumors were spreading that drilling at Kola Superdeep Borehole had to stop because a gate to hell was accidentally opened in the process and the hole became known as the ‘Well to Hell’. Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), an American Chrisitan television program ran the story in 1989 and it kept spreading through the doing of several evangelical mouthpieces beyond the U.S. in the following years. The evidence, a recording of faint screams of agony supposedly taken inside the hole still circulates on the internet today.
While hell was streaming out of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a similar project in West Germany, the German Continental Deep Drilling Program which ran from 1987- 1995 remained a surprisingly ‘peaceful’ endeavour. It did not reach the mantle either and only made it 9,1km into the ground. But it did end up serving a purpose, as it enabled crucial in-novations serving the oil drilling industry today. Kola Superdeep Borehole remains the deepest vertical borehole to this day, even though it is not the longest borehole anymore, as it was overtaken by the Al Shaheen Oil Well off the coast of Qatar in 2008.
Measuring our distance to the core and the width of the mantle uses similar methods fracking engineers use, to map fossil fuels in the earth’s crust. I won’t be able to find the exact map of what is underneath the soil my feet touch as I am standing outside the fence. This map would be held securely by the extraction company, in this case Angus Energy.
Blackboxed intellectual property is the most valuable resource in the oil and gas industry. Schlumberger, one of the world’s largest oil service companies with around 120,000 employees of 140 different nationalities for example operates its only research and development centres - 125 of them (Wylie 2018). They made their market niche not through sophisticated engineering equipment but a novel sensory method to map the subsurface and detect unconventional reservoirs of oil and gas.
As vision is useless in navigating the landscape of the subsurface, the primary technology used relies on acoustic sensing and translating this data back into a visual via seismic imaging. The maps are privately owned and undisclosed to the general public. The development of these techniques however has its touching points with the public at Higher Education institutions. The MIT Energy Initiative for example was founded between the university and corporate partners BP, Eni, ExxonMobile and Shell. Their goal is quite vague: “Linking science, innovation, and policy to transform the world’s energy systems.“ (MITEI 2021). What isn’t quite as vague in their funding policies is the percentage (75%) by which corporate founding members are able to dictate the direction of the research. They also have first dibs on pur-chasing the worldwide royalty-bearing commercial license for technology developed at the centre. From 2006-2011 founding members each donated 5 million dollars per year to MITEI, a worthwhile investment when speculating how much capital was generated from the technologies developed at the centre. I am not a researcher at MITEI, but even if I was I wouldn’t be able to and not be allowed to draw a map of what is underneath Brockham Oil Field.
Making a Map
Take a pencil and let it hover over a piece of paper so it only touches it all so slightly. Sit tight, try not to move your arm anymore at all, you need to keep still. Your journey from Dorking Station to Herne Hill Station requires two different trains. It goes like this: Dorking - Leatherhead - Ashtead - Epsom - Ewell East - Cheam - Sutton [change trains here] - Carshalton - Hack-bridge - Mitcham Junction - Mitcham Eastfields - Streatham - Tulse Hill - Herne Hill. From Herne Hill I will ride my bike to my house. The first train is run by “Southern”, the second train by “Thameslink”. Both are owned and operated by Govia Thames Railway. Govia is a transport venture by Go-Ahead and Keolis. Go-Ahead is registered at the London stock exchange and Keolis’ headquarter is in the Rue Le Peletier in Paris. On this route, it is most likely that you will travel on a 377 Electrostar and these are the possible models you might sit in: 377/1-62, 377/2-15, 377/3-28, 377/4-75 built between 2001-2005, 377/6-26 built 2012-2014. Or the most recent one: 377/7-8. They were all built after British Rail was sold to Railtrack. The Electros-tar is an EMU (electric multi-unit) passenger train. Southern (Govia Thameslink Railways) commissioned Bombardier Transportation to build this fleat. Bombardier Transportation was founded in Cana-da in 1974 after it purchased the Austrian coachbuilding company Lohner-Werke GmbH in 1970 and they moved their headquarters to Berlin in 2017. Around 36,000 people work for Bombardier. In 2001 it became the largest rail-equipment manufacturer in the West. In 2004 Bombardier closed production facilities in Derby, Wakefield and Doncaster. Bombardier used the manufacturer Derby Litchurch Lane Works in the Midlands where trains were built from 1840 and that is now owned by the French Company Alstom SA. Alstom SA acquired Bombardier in 2021. Alstom SA was founded in 1932 as a merche of the Massachusetts enterprise Thomson-Houston Electric Company which was founded in 1882 and the company Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques which was founded in France in 1826. Al-stom continued by initially swallowing up Constructions Electr ques de France in 1932, Chantiers de l’Atlantique in partially the Belgium manufacturer ACEC in the late 1980s. Alstom is insatiable but when it wanted to merge with Siemens Mobility in 2017, the European Commission wouldn’t allow it and Alstom purchased Bombardier Transportation in early 2021 instead. 75,000 people are working for Alstom and its total assets in 2019 were valued at 13,400,000,000 EUR, that’s EUR 178,666.66 per worker. 3.1 % of Alstom is owned by Bombardier, which means that Bombardier is simultaneously owned by and an owner of Alstom. Now sit tight and wait for the train to start moving and feel your body moving along with it. The Electrostar is said to have a power output of 1,600 horsepower which is 1193120 W which rounds down to 1193 kW. [This must be an average number, as I can imagine this might vary with load of pa sengers, temperature, the quality of the tracks the train glides on]. Kilo Watt measures the rate of energy usage, the power one can pro-duce and it seems like this is a virtual number of imaginary potential. This power needs to be put in context of time in order for me to talk about it in terms of labour and capital. The train journey takes 24 + 29 minutes, so 53 minutes in total. The electricity used on this journey could amount to 1054 kWh because if x = energy usage then x = (53/60) 1193 which means x = 1054. Still, don’t move your arm as the train on the tracks will rock your body, at times gently, at times violently and your body and its extension, the pencil, will hover over the page and leave a line on it. I couldn’t find out where Govia buys their energy and accordingly don’t know how this energy was sourced so I need to work with a current number which consid-ers the energy fuel mix for electricity in British households here: it states that 0.223 kg of Carbon-dioxide are emitted per kWh. For our journey, we shared 235kg of CO2 with our fellow passen-gers. At 21 degrees celsius, this gas could be contained in a box of about 5m x 5m x 5m. Once energy is used up it doesn’t mean that it is gone, it has simply translated into heat. The line out you created is the map of the Weald Basin today.
