Adventures in Oil

British Petroleum’s ongoing oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this summer has shocked and disturbed victims and onlookers at every turn - from the spectacular explosion on April 20th that took the lives of eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, to the oil company’s repeated botched attempts to stop the subsequent oil leak. The consequences have been catastrophic. For the past eight weeks oil has been gushing into the Gulf at rate so alarming that it dwarfs the impact of the historically tragic Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. The unabated leak from the BP rig disaster has produced an oil slick that has already devastated ecosystems and economies throughout the Gulf region. And yet BP’s public response has been explicit and cowardly denial of the oil company’s responsibilities at every mark.

In the first place, BP denied its workers safe conditions on the Deepwater Horizon rig as it cut corners and created this predictably disastrous scenario. In statements to the press in mid-May, BP CEO Tony Hayward very publicly denied the scale and severity of the catastrophe caused by his company. He told Sky News that, “The environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest,” and made the audacious statement to the Guardian newspaper that, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Until today, BP has failed to successfully execute action to cap the source of gushing oil, and the uncapped leak is predicted to continue flowing until Christmas. Following the explosion, BP denied public access to internal knowledge about the precise quantity of the oil leaking into the Gulf following the rig explosion. For weeks news reports echoed the official low-ball estimate of 5,000 barrels per day; however, honest calculations have pinned a more reliable figure to at least 30,000 barrels - or nearly one million gallons - per day.

Until now, BP has failed to implement a sufficient clean up effort, as oil corrodes marshes and beaches, devastating the wildlife in oceanic and coastal habitats. BP continues to deny full culpability for the scale of the devastation that has been wrought as a consequence of the oil spill in the region and the scale of the devastation, and the oil company has recently hired a firm dedicated to reducing payouts for compensation claims. 

Undoubtedly, this unfolding news event has shocked many of us. However, it is also important to understand how this sense of shock reveals a collective failure of imagination on the part of American consumers. It is safe to assume that any knowledge the average consumer and US citizen has of oil company operations is limited to information is generated by the oil companies themselves. Catchy advertising campaigns, branding, sponsorship and consumer products bombard and influence us with positive images of oil companies whether we notice or not. Today, the attention of most Americans is wholly captivated by images of the physical manifestation of oil wealth, from Dubai’s towers to Nascar and Hummer stretch-limos. The critical question of exactly how this wealth is generated - and more specifically, at what cost - is never posed by mainstream society’s perception of oil companies.

Today, the spectacle of oil wealth has rendered invisible the true human and environmental costs and risks of oil extraction, production and consumption. However, looking back at the history of how oil companies constructed their own public image reveals that this was not always the case. On the contrary, during the pioneering decades of oil extraction in the Middle East - 1920s to the 1950s - oil companies produced big-budget PR films that featured company operations as a spectacle in and of themselves. 

From laying pipeline across the desert, to daily operations of pumping on a rig, working the refinery and manning a tanker, major oil companies like the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) as well as BP - then named the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - used the camera to spotlight company laborers who were hard at work bringing oil from deep underground to consumers’ automobile tanks. This is not to say that oil wealth was not a spectacle in these films as well. In fact, the spectacle of what oil wealth could produce in terms of national development - specifically for the modernizing countries of the Middle East - served as an important means for legitimizing the multiple costs and risks of the enterprise of oil extraction. 

Exemplary of this kind of oil company PR work is the IPC film The Third River from 1952. In brief, the film is about the physical operations required for the company to plan, transport and build a pipeline crossing the deserts of the Middle East to reach ports in the Mediterranean Sea that allow Iraq’s oil to be shipped to the modern European consumer. A large part of the film focuses visually on the work of toiling Arab laborers overseen by British company men, as seen in the film still pictured above. 

The narratives constructed to represent oil company operations were undoubtedly idealized, the actual costs and risks misrepresented, the portrayal of labor problematic on many levels, and the justifications given for the oil company’s actions plentiful; making this film ripe for further critical analysis.

Nonetheless, I’d like to end here by focusing on the general point that five decades ago an entire film could be dedicated to making visible the technical and human operations of oil extraction. Today these operations are entirely invisible from mainstream perception of oil companies. It is time that all of us start demanding knowledge of how oil is being extracted from the earth and delivered to us…and most importantly, at what cost? 

Image Source: The Third River (Pamphlet). 1952. Iraq Petroleum Company Film Unit. London: Newman Neame Limited. p 10.