Midstream:
The midstream sector of the petroleum industry, involving the transportation (by pipeline, rail, barge, oil tanker or truck), storage, and wholesale marketing of crude or refined petroleum products.
Twilight:
A period or state of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline.
Midstream at Twilight is a short film about dark ecology and the necessary death of an industry. Through the aerial perspective of a drone, my experimental documentaryMidstream at Twilight traces the liminal infrastructure of oil pipelines between its source in the tar sands of Canada’s boreal forest to a landscape of refineries in the US Midwest.
The drone view continues to scan the prairies and rivers for signs of the further distribution of the toxic particulate refinery by-product: petroleum coke or ‘petcoke’ as it is known in the industry. After hovering above the corporate headquarters of Koch Industries, Inc., the largest dealer of petcoke in the US, the film concludes along the Pacific coast, at the port of Long Beach / Los Angeles, where petcoke is loaded onto tanker ships to be sent to markets in China where it is burned in power plants and converted into toxic plumes of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Following the northern jet stream, these pollutants return to North America and the feedback loop of climate change continues to spin out of control. When viewed, Midstream at Twilight functions as a form of psychic direct action and, as such, can invoke a corporate death curse against a fossil fuel industry in decline.
Click to enlarge these production stills from Midstream at Twilight and learn more about this experimental documentary.
One of the few ways one can trace an oil pipeline across a continent is to spot markers like this, on the edge of a road.
Primeval forests and muskeg peat bogs and earth of the Athabasca Boreal Forest on the edge of the denuded, drained, and scraped wasteland known as the Athabasca Oil Sands. Athabasca is the anglicized name of the Cree word aðapaskāw, which means "where there are plants one after another." In April 2016 many trees appeared burned. One month later, the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire destroyed vast swaths of these forests.
“Returned to Nature” claim by the company Syncrude Canada Ltd which owns 400 square miles of open-pit mines, refineries, man camps, and toxic tailings lakes in the area. Resembling a nature preserve, Gateway Hill is a privately owned estate of roughly 100 square miles of evenly planted conifers, rectangular ponds, and grids of sod, sand, and muskeg.
Reclamation billboard advertisement with tailings waste lake. Syncrude uses the word reclamation loosely.
Syncrude is the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil from oil sands. They produce 350,000 barrels per day and have leases on 12 billion barrels worth of oil sands, which will keep them mining and producing for the another 90–100 years at this capacity. Most of this oil is pumped across North America through thousands of miles of buried pipelines. Their corporate flag is often seen flying above the Canadian national flag.
Syncrude’s land holdings include overlooks which gives them opportunities to serve green-wash propaganda to the public via displays such as this, advertising future lakefront property of a renatured landscape where destroyed ecosystems rapidly repair themselves after human remediation, at unlikely accelerated rates.
Picnic spot and interpretive signage explaining the surrounding altered surface of the land.
Overlooking this artificial sludgescape are replanted hills such as this, created by heaping piles of overburden from what used to be active mines, where, before the middle of the 20th century, ancient boreal forests stood for millions of years.
Syncrude frozen tailings lakes foreground the mine and plant sites at the Athabasca Oil Sands, Alberta, Canada. The dramatic ricocheting sounds of gunshots heard at all hours of the day and night are, in fact, sensor-triggered propane cannons deterring birds from landing on the toxic slush.
Autonomous, radar activated robo-hawk bird deterrents awaiting the thaw of a frozen waste filled tailings lake adjacent to Syncrude’s Mildred Lake tar sands plant. The retaining dam built to form this basin is one of the largest earth structures in the world. The water is so toxic that birds can die within minutes of exposure. Each dead bird costs the responsible company $120,000 Canadian dollars, if reported.
Syncrude’s plant is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in Canada, emitting ammonia, sulphuric acid, sulphur dioxide, and xylene, amongst other pollutants, during the “upgrade” processing of crude bitumen, scraped from the land here.
Roadside attraction of decommissioned mining equipment such as this giant bucketwheel which uses carbide tipped incisors to gouge the muskeg peat and soil, exposing the oil-rich sands beneath. In the background is a dragline which is used to carry away extracted material.
A man camp which houses thousands of mostly male employees of companies like Syncrude and Suncor. Miners are rotated out in regular shifts of weeks-on / weeks-off to allow them to return to family across Canada’s provinces. Like an offshore rig, tanker vessel, or orbiting space station, these remote habitats are entirely enclosed and self-sufficient with local power stations, waste treatment facilities, recreation, and dormitories.
Tar Sands diluted bitumen pipelines run beneath this clear swath of land, dividing this subdivision in suburban Edmonton, Alberta. The oil in these pipelines, owned by Enbridge Inc., flows at five miles per hour across the plains of North America, terminating at refineries in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, and Texas.
Enbridge owns many of the pipelines bringing tar sands oil to the USA from Canada. Just south of the border, in northern North Dakota, markers alert farmers, construction crews, and drivers, warning them to not dig and carry on, ignoring the infrastructure. If not for regulations, these markers wouldn't exist and the pipelines would be completely covert.
A warming station where the slow-moving sludge is periodically heated in the buried pipes to maintain viscosity.
Aerial dronecam perspective of the Koch Industries-owned Flint Hills Resources MINNCAN oil pipeline as it cuts across the Mississippi River headwaters in northern Minnesota, between the White Earth and Leech Lake Indian Reservations. This pipeline carries upgraded bitumen from the tar sands in Alberta to the Flint Hills Pine Bend Oil Refinery near Minnesota's Twin Cities.
At the Flint Hills refinery, tar sands oil is used to produce fuels, polymers, and other chemicals. Due to the chemical impurities in tar sands bitumen (oil), petcoke is generated in large volumes as a byproduct then shipped down the Mississippi River and sent by rail along the “midstream” distribution network to ports on all three coasts. Most of the oil arrives, unseen, via pipeline but also by rail as seen here.
Pipelines continue across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois reaching storage tanks like this in Indiana. Next door, across the state line from neighborhoods in South Chicago, the oil awaits its final journey in its liquid state to a nearby refinery owned by Amoco which paid to have this little park built, ostensibly to make up for the altered view and potential exposure to instant death by catastrophic explosions of fuel tanks.
Just beyond the golf course and Whiting, Indiana is BP’s Whiting Refinery, which is the largest producer of the petcoke byproduct in the Midwest. Also visible is the U.S. Steel Works in Gary, Indiana and Lake Michigan, the primary source of fresh water for most of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Critical ecosystems and volatile industry, side by side.
The petcoke processing unit, known as a “coker,” at BP Whiting.
Along the tar sands pipeline is also the ExxonMobil Joliet Refinery petrochemical plant and Illinois Headquarters.
Koch Industries, Inc. KCBX petcoke terminal, South Chicago. This terminal is anything but. Petcoke, a waste product of the refining of crude oil and tar sands bitumen, is sent downstream by rail and barge and, eventually, by tanker to countries in Asia like China where it is burned in power plants. The material accretion of the North American fossil fuel industry may terminate in those furnaces, but the chemical toxins return home, in the form of global greenhouse gases and runaway climate change.
Storage tanks of tar sands oil along the Marathon Pipeline site in Vernon, Illinois.
Koch Industries global headquarters, Wichita, Kansas. Not far is the Koch family estate, surrounded by razor wire atop high stone walls which provide no protection against airborne drones with cameras.
The industry protects its reputation and relations with the public through visitor centers and carefully curated museums such as the the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
The gift shop at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre sells clothing in all sizes.
History is often written by the winners, so how do we contend with the largest industry on Earth now that we know the truth? Who will own the narrative of climate change?
Featured image: This film still from Midstream at Twilight shows the first identified site in a long string of locations filmed in the winter and spring of 2016 along a 4,000 mile journey from Northern Alberta and across the Midwest before bifurcating south to the Texas Gulf Coast and west to the Port of Los Angeles. Image by Steve Rowell, 2016.
Editor’s note: All images are production stills from Midstream at Twilight, Steve Rowell, 2016. The captions for these production stills were written for this contribution to Edge Effects by the artist. Portions of the film description also appear on the artist’s website.
Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts to produce complex multicomponent works. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, ecologies, and technology in the landscape. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. Born in Houston, Steve has been based in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago over the past twenty years. He currently lives in Minnesota and teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute as Assistant Professor of Photography. Website.Contact.
