The frontiers of North America’s fossil fuel boom: BP, Tar Sands, and the re-industrialization of the Calumet Region

Graham Pickren

doi:10.2458/v26i1.23106

Abstract

This article focuses in on the ways in which the North American energy boom is reworking environments and livelihoods in the Great Lakes, focusing in particular on the expansion of BP's Chicago-area refinery as it has pivoted towards processing Canadian tar sands oil. In examining this 're-industrialization', the article contributes to an ongoing discussion about the relationship between fossil fuels, limits to capitalism, and the importance of frontiers in resolving capitalist crises. The first empirical section of the article looks at the early history of the Calumet's development as a hub for fossil fuel distribution and refining and, drawing from Moore's 'world-ecology framework', demonstrates the ways in the appropriation of unpaid work/energy - in particular the appropriation of the wetlands that make up the southern tip of Lake Michigan - serves as the underappreciated condition of possibility for the BP Whiting refinery's existence. Today, this combination of productivity and plunder continues in the region, illustrating urban metabolisms that are not confined to the city. In the second empirical section of the article, I argue that despite predictions of crises arising from declining ecological surpluses, in Calumet today, BP is finding new frontiers of surplus value production, both in the form of producing petcoke and in continued geographic expansion in the region. As a way of understanding the persistence and adaptive capacity of capital, even in degraded landscapes like Calumet, I consider Johnson's concept of 'accumulation by degradation' as an excellent tool for understanding dynamics in the region. The production of both petcoke and pollution – undesirable from a social and ecological perspective – sustain BP's industrial colonialism in the region because they ensure weakened competition and below market rents that allow for expansion and place-based longevity.Keywords: tar sands, oil, refining, appropriation, accumulation by degradation, Chicago

Highlights

This article explores what some local activists have called the 're-industrialization' of Chicago's Calumet region (Schnurr 2017), which stretches from the far South Side of the city into Northwest Indiana, hugging Lake Michigan's southern coastline
Much of this re-industrialization is tied to the relatively recent boom in North American fossil fuel production, the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels from Canadian tar sands and oil and gas extracted from shale formations
From the auto-dependent suburb to monocrops of soy and corn, if we look upstream from these processes we find landscapes of fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution that enable them

Summary

Introduction

This article explores what some local activists have called the 're-industrialization' of Chicago's Calumet region (Schnurr 2017), which stretches from the far South Side of the city into Northwest Indiana, hugging Lake Michigan's southern coastline Much of this re-industrialization is tied to the relatively recent boom in North American fossil fuel production, the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels from Canadian tar sands and oil and gas extracted from shale formations.. This system is currently expanding to accommodate additional Canadian production, which raises additional threats to the drinking water supply for 40 million people (Egan 2017) These pipelines, and the storage facilities they connect to in places like Griffith, Indiana, outside of Chicago, in turn connect to refineries around the Great Lakes in both the U.S and Canada, where the 'carbon bomb' (McKibben 2011) embedded in these unconventional fossil fuels is made accessible to consumers. It concludes with a discussion of what this case study suggests about the future of renewable energy and the importance of energy democracy

Frontiers of appropriation

Appropriating the free gifts of the Calumet

Findings

Conclusions