The Hole World: scales and spaces of extraction

Abstract

Eighty-one percent of the world's primary energy supply is derived from oil, coal or natural gas.Four-fifths of the energy we use -to create commodities, heat houses and schlep our stuff around -comes from holes in the ground.From out of these holes issues forth an amount of energy equivalent to 9,800 million tons of oil each year. 1 Extraction is a primal pursuit, a business of wresting raw materials from the earth that can be converted into value.From pits, wells and mines, raw geology is liquidated into energy and money, a doublealchemy at the heart of the modern capitalist economy.Improved intensities in the use of energy within OECD countries have not lessened the dependence of contemporary cultural and economic life on the extraction of fossil energies.The car, the fridge and the lightbulbtechnological embodiments of modernity's power to diminish distance, forestall the seasons, and render irrelevant the earth's rotation -remain, for the most part, tethered to a netherworld of rocks and reservoirs.Landscapes of energy extraction are portals, worm-holes between two worlds in which time and space work differently.Underground lies a world of 'natural production,' the deep-time processes beyond human control that create the hydrocarbon concentrations we know as fossil fuels.Because the conditions under which hydrocarbons form and collect are not found everywhere, the quality of underground space is highly variable: the highest-quality concentrations provide massive ecological subsidies to modern economic and social life.Above-ground and freed from geological fixity, energy is thrown into a tumultuous world of 'social production,' a surface world of mobility and change where 'the quality of space, as well as that of time, isasymptomatically reduced to zerothe 'annihilation of space by time'. 2 If