World of Desertion: Fossil Capitalist Liabilities & Contradictions in Alberta's Conventional Hydrocarbon Economy

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze the political-ecological and economic conditions of ‘orphaned’ conventional oil and gas infrastructural assets in the province of Alberta, Canada. Specifically, I research fossil capitalist firms’ legal obligations to these deserted, rather than orphaned, infrastructural assets through the lens of liability management. To my knowledge, I offer the first critique of this region’s fossil capitalist liability management regime through a combined critical physical geologic and political economic framework utilizing geoscientific scholarship, political ecology, theories of capitalist crisis, and Marxian critique of statecraft. Specifically, this dissertation explores 1) the conditions under which infrastructure can be deserted; 2) the history and design of the provincial Alberta Energy Regulatory (AER), which is responsible for the ongoing mismanagement of corporate liability and ecological restoration; 3) the conditions under which geotechnical labour operates within the industry to produce capitalist value; 4) the relationships, both in terms of competition and cooperation, between the two major factions of fossil capital and finance capital in the province. To analyze these processes, I consider the geotechnical aspects of wells, pipelines, and processing facilities and their fate in becoming deserted assets. I then turn to analyzing the province's historic and modern liability management regime of fossil assets. I argue that the failure of the region's environmental governance follows from the overwhelming political power of the fossil capitalist hegemonic bloc, as understood by Marxist theories of the capitalist state. The dissertation concludes by arguing that the industry's Orphan Well Association (OWA) was founded as an attempted socioecological fix to the structural contradictions of fossil capitalism manifesting in the 'slow-motion landslide' of deserted fossil assets. I qualify these structural crises in hydrocarbon extraction and production present in Alberta, undermining the ability of fossil capitalism to reproduce itself, through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key informants. Through this research, it is evident that the province has been subject to fossil capitalist political power which has led to ecological mismanagement, the sidelining of scientific expertise, and the continual destruction of the physical conditions of production which fossil capital relies on to (re)produce itself.