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The Verticality of Drilling: Construction, Destruction, and Disturbance

Sat, September 1, 9:00 to 10:30am, ICC, E5.4

Abstract

This paper probes how drilling’s capacity to disturb, destroy, and construct reorganizes ecological and social relationships. Drilling unfolds many possibilities - for extraction, construction and infrastructure. We explore drilling by honing in on two slices of verticality. Extending our understanding of what Michael Watts calls a “science of the vertical” comprised of a “landscape of lines, axes, hubs, spokes, nodes, points, blocks, and flows,” we track not only below the surface but also above, into the terrestrial crust and the atmosphere. These include changing methods and techniques for directional drilling and wellbore navigation, the design of drill bits, networks of data processing and interpretation, geological surveys, and rapid landscape transformations. We argue that drilling’s capacity to enable possibilities is undermined by the ground and its affordances. By exploring the differences and similarities between above and below-ground drilling we show drilling’s importance beyond the engineering and construction industries. Finally, we look at how what may ordinarily taken to be by-products of these processes - rubble, broken tools, and soil - are constitutive of drilling, exceed it and are brought into a reserve of techniques and means. Drawing on our fieldwork in offshore oil rigs and construction sites, our contribution argues that the lines between extraction and construction, resource and debris, and the ground and the artificial are porous.

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