Techno-Solutionism and Strategies of Delay: The Bay du Nord Development Project
BY HELEN A. HAYES & JANNA FRENZEL
In April 2022, following an environmental assessment by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, the Government of Canada approved the Bay du Nord Development Project in the Flemish Pass, an oceanic basin 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. The province’s first remote, deep water oil project, Bay du Nord, which is operated by Norwegian oil giant Equinor, is expected to generate 300 million barrels of oil and an associated $3.5 billion in provincial government revenue.
Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial government, much like the Norwegian government, has argued that technological advancements used for its offshore drilling projects will result in lower carbon emissions than those of other jurisdictions. These claims about so-called “low-carbon” oil, however, tend to exclude Scope 3 emissions from carbon accounting. While Scope 1 and 2 emissions indicate both the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur from sources controlled or owned by an organisation (e.g., from vehicles or machinery) or those linked to the purchasing of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling, Scope 3 emissions occur downstream, predominantly resulting from customers purchasing and burning oil. Importantly, Scope 3 make up the lion’s share of emissions in the oil supply chain.
A map of Bay du Nord from Equinor’s website, https://www.equinor.com/where-we-are/canada-bay-du-nord
While “low-carbon oil” may be easily dismissed as yet another example of Big Oil’s greenwashing, there is a deeper, more fundamental change at work here: “low-carbon” oil is but one part of the shifting debate, corporate practice, and policymaking that has increasingly looked to technology as means to a more “sustainable” end. As such, instead of fossil fuel phaseout, attention has turned to carbon capture, “efficient” and “automated” extraction, and other ecomodern [1] techno-solutions, many of which don’t actually currently exist, yet figure centrally in claims about the oil industry’s present and future eco-consciousness. In fact, deepwater extraction and so-called “low-carbon oil” are increasingly viewed as a clean slate for both resource and technology industries – the key to producing sustainable energy futures, despite those futures being steeped in the same “oily logic” of eras gone by. Put simply, in this context, techno-solutionism insists on sustaining, building, and defining petro-futures; it propels global dependence on fossil fuels under the guise of environmental and technological progressivism.
Techno-solutionism is part of the larger hypocrisy of net-zero pledges by tech companies who use eco-conscious rhetoric to tout their low, neutral, or carbon negative operations and thereby conceal their involvement in the fossil economy through close cooperation with resource giants that intensify oil and gas extraction. While Big Tech companies like Amazon have touted lofty goals towards net-zero emissions within the next two decades, numbers reveal that company-wide emissions have actually increased drastically. Fossil fuel corporations, in turn, have begun responding to divestment campaigns by arguing that only they can propel the shift to renewables, but their investments in them still make up a negligible share of business (Li et al., 2022). These described corporate strategies are likewise propped up through policymaking, which plays a key role in turning popular discourse into material reality: in the United States, for example, the Energy Act (2020) significantly re-focussed what was once called the “energy transition” toward regulating emissions from fossil fuel production and developing carbon removal and utilisation technologies (Buck, 2021, p.28).
These promises, practices, and processes of simultaneous “environmentalism,” technologization, and oil accumulation produce growing frontiers of capitalism that privilege economic growth over increasing calls to halt – or, at the very least, decrease dependence on – oil extraction. In this way, the Bay du Nord project is made to fuel and maintain modern capitalist industries: its extractive logic “puts the Earth and its forests, terrains, animals, and oceans to work, in order to improve upon the waste places of the Earth” (Daggett 2019, p. 61). In the Canadian context, “low carbon” oil can also be understood as a continuation of earlier attempts at framing all Canadian oil, particularly that extracted from Alberta’s oil sands, as “ethical” (Kinder, 2020; Laurie, 2019). The legitimacy work undertaken through this discursive framing has gained new traction since the start of the war in Ukraine, with industry and government players pushing for expanded fossil infrastructures in the name of the West’s energy security.
Given this context, perhaps we may choose to view techno-solutions with scepticism and consider how ecomodern logics risk accelerating forces of exploitation, repression, violence, and environmental destruction. While true that the amount of carbon emissions per barrel of extracted oil is lower if powered by hydro rather than fossil fuels, and deepwater drilling technologies are less carbon intensive than tar sands mining, focusing on supposedly “clean” extraction processes and their related technologies distracts from a more fundamental question: should oil continue to be extracted, sold, and burnt at all, or ought it solely be “kept in the ground”? After all, any eco-efficiency gains from technological advancement will not likely create significant progress towards global sustainability because tech “innovation” necessarily enriches corporate billionaires, hides offshore ecological costs, and inevitably expands both production and consumption rates of petro-products. For these reasons, the trend towards so-called “low-carbon oil” and its related techno-solutions, especially in the context of the Bay du Nord project, may require us to rethink Canadian frontiers of fossil capital and reposition ourselves in the struggle against a renewed reinforcement of petroculture.
End Notes
[1] Ecomodernism is the view that state-sponsored and controlled technological innovation is necessary for human and ecological flourishing, and has been increasingly viewed as a key part of any successful strategy to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
Works Cited
Buck, H. J. 2021. “Ending Fossil Fuels Why Net Zero Is Not Enough”, London: Verso.
Daggett, Cara New. 2019. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Li M, Trencher G, Asuka J. 2022. The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments. PLoS One 16;17(2):e0263596. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263596.
Kinder, Jordan B. 2020. From dirty oil to ethical oil: Petroturfing and the cultural politics of Canadian oil after social media. Journal of Environmental Media, 1(2), 167-183. https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00014_1.
Laurie, Roberta. 2019. “Still Ethical Oil. Framing the Alberta Oil Sands”, in: Graves, H. and Beard, D. E. (eds.): The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century Government, Corporate, and Activist Discourses, New York: Routledge.
Helen A. Hayes is a doctoral student at McGill University where she examines the material histories of oil media, emphasizing how Artificial Intelligence and other information technologies are used in oil prospecting, extraction, refining, and transport in Canada. This research is supported by both FRQSC and SSHRC. She is an active member of the Grierson Research Group and a Research Manager at the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy.
Janna Frenzel is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), working on the materiality and sociotechnical imaginaries of computing and attempts to decarbonize and re-design digital infrastructures. Her research is supported by SSHRC and Concordia University. Janna is a founding member of the Solar Media Collective and a member of the Grierson Research and Low-Carbon Research Methods groups.
