FRACK 1: Fracking
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“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabac say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” — H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival
In 1985, Sun Oil, the company that had been formed from the sale of the Haymaker Well to Edward Octavius Emerson and Joeseph Pew in 1882, had acres on acres of old, exhausted oilfields. One of these was at Austin Chalk, where some enterprising employees decided to experiment with mud motors and explosives.1 They figured out a new process: You drop a mud motor down one of those old holes out in the desert, drill sideways at the bottom of the wellbore and then again at 90° angles to the first tunnel, and you’ve got a holey network running under every foot of rock. You explode it and rinse out the methane, like squeezing a sponge. You could do it anywhere, like back home in Petrolia, Pennsylvania.
The results were profligate; overwhelming amounts of new gas. A new supply in old hands. Now Methane followed the path forged by coal: production emerging from within the Imperial Core to generate fresh, clean cashflows that followed familiar paths (Blackrock, and so on).
Energy commodities, benzin al-jinn, must work through human systems of power in order to gain dominance over us. To do so, in the current context, they can only directly influence supply and demand. Humans may have other mechanisms to influence and game the markets, from governments to options, but benzin al-jinn can only be unearthed at a given rate and burned (or transmuted) at another rate. Their position is similar to that of any worker: all we have to sell is our labor. The main difference is that the quantity of labor on offer by benzin al-jinn is transcendentally higher than what any flesh and blood animal can give their employer in forty hour weeks.
Of these two, supply and demand, benzin al-jinn can most directly and easily impact supply. They will suddenly manifest in reservoirs so big as to dazzle humans, to seem to promise much easy wealth. And then when they deliver, that wealth evaporates as the price crashes. And so I can say that gas wants to be cheap, at certain historical moments.
In the early 2000s gas was on track to get incrementally more expensive over time, making it an investment good enough that it would be fiduciarily irresponsible to miss out on investments like the Sabine Pass LNG Import terminal.
This prospect of rising prices pleased liberals, because the 2010s were set to be, as we said at the time, the last decade where we could have averted the worst of global warming. Higher carbon prices would have made other technologies more competitive in the open market. We didn’t dare to wish for a more direct state intervention to the problem.
In the 2000s, Aubrey McClendon, highly leveraged, started buying up land and drilling rights in Oklahoma and environs. By the twentyteens he had inundated markets with the floods of his fracks.
Think of shale rock as a loaf of good bread; the yeast has exhaled into every space, leaving solid membranes around alveoli of gas. Sometimes you’ll get a huge hole in your slice, and you’ll have to carefully engineer your sandwich around it. Those are the traditional reservoirs. Frack gas comes from the rest.
To be clear: fracking can produce oil, but mostly produces gas. You can frack an oil well, but you may only get gas. Shale oil is not fracked. That euphemism refers to boiling the rock to produce an oil. That was happening, too, at increasing rates. Sands, too. “Unconventional” supply hitting the market in earnest.
Do this for me: take a half of a sourdough boule, and stab it with a knife from the white down to the crust at the far end. Then soak the bread with water. Then take an air compressor and blast it at a minimum of 100 PSI. The delicate, rhizomatic network that the yeast has grown is destroyed, and whatever was contained within is forced out.
Fracking is the industrialization of the truth discussed in Cyclonopedia that all that is solid, like the Earth, is infected by the void. There are pockets of gas beneath our feet, coexisting with the rock and soil. The relevant passage is made all the more relevant because it is here that he has to deal with the filthy old racist Lovecraft as well as that accelerationist (no insult is grater) Nick Land:
“According to Lovecraft, the realism of horror is built upon poromechanics…But how do holes emerge out of the interactions of solid and void? It is best to answer this question by paraphrasing Nick Land’s remarks (from Thirst for Annihilation)…: void excludes solid but solid must include void to architectonically survive. Solid needs void to engineer its composition; even the most despotic and survivalist solids are compositional solids, infected by the void. Through these inter-collisions of void and solid, the Old Ones — according to Lovecraft — can revive their ‘Holocaust of Freedom’ (Call of Cthulhu), both by consuming solid and by pushing compositions towards the highest degrees of convolution (as a result of the ambiguity of solid and void: i.e. the fuzzy space of the hole and its surface dynamics). In terms of Earth, the Holocaust of Freedom can be attained by engineering the corpse of solidus through installing ungrounding machines at molecular levels that exhume (ex + humus: unground) the earth from within and without, turning it into a vermicular and holey composition whose strata (The Economy of Solidus) is not dismantled but convoluted at each level of its own formation and composition.”
In Lovecraft’s diseased, racist mind, the Old Ones are Black, precolonial. But he was wrong. Very, disgustingly wrong. They are White, driven by monomaniacal pre-human “mind that is held by no head” into a frenzy of colonial violence: the Holocaust of Freedom. Sure, committing holocausts on places and peoples much more free than American capitalism could ever allow, but nonetheless acting in the name of Freedom, brand America. Theirs was the freedom of “free markets,” which are actually open markets; markets ripped open and exposed to the worldwide torrents of colonial expropriation, just as the fracked earth is ripped open to let the gas escape into the Day. Not just open markets, but freshly opened markets; these are the raw veins that capitalism needs to grow; everyone knows that capitalism requires a perpetual frontier.
Negarestani: “Although the void devours the solid, the solid feasts on the void, i.e., its outsider. In compositions, the solid becomes hysterically gluttonous for the void. This is what intrigued the Cult of the Old Ones in their mission to perform their awakening ritual. If the Old Ones are to fly through holey space, bubbling up through the carrion black pit and turning their tentacles into interconnected borrows and lubricious warrens, then the only strategic technique is to mess with the ( )hole complex.”
Fracking is a strategic mess. So are all other methods of hydrocarbon extraction. It is a messy business.
Fracking came along late in the day, after the Oil Wars had been going on for a century and it was already established that the American empire brought freedom only for its perpetrators, lords of finance and industry whose creatures became known as Intelligence after the War. But also too late to stop them.
And so they embarked upon a fresh Holocaust of Freedom, again conveniently against their old bogeyman, the Russians. For frozen Frack Gas (LNG) to escape domestic consumption and rule the old country, Russian gas must be denied entry into Europe. What was actually happening within Russia didn’t matter to the narrative that America needed to justify a new war.
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Charles Blanchard, The Extraction State.
