2 Lines of Work, Corridors of PowerExtraction, Obstruction, and Counter-obstruction Along Fossil Fuel Production Networks

James Lawson

Bring in the workers and bring up the rails

We’re gonna lay down the tracks and tear up the trails

Open her heart, let the life blood flow

Gotta get on our way, ’cause we’re moving too slow.

Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”

The above lines come from a venerable contribution to English-Canadian national mythology, a song commissioned by the CBC to celebrate the country’s centennial. Aired in a CBC Radio broadcast on January 1, 1967, Lightfoot’s ballad drew on an already well-established theme in Canadian historiography: the central role of mercantile and railway interests in the westward expansion of the Canadian nation following Confederation (Creighton 1956; Naylor 1972).

In these lines, Lightfoot metaphorically links the settlement of the land (and the ability to speed across it) to the flow of blood and, by extension, to blood sacrifice. But the song goes on to invoke a second image of flow, which falls at a triumphant climax in the music just before the closing refrain: “We have opened up the soil / with our teardrops and our toil.” Here, Lightfoot speaks of the hard labour of navvies required for this victory over the land, a flow of sweat and tears that presumably justifies the sacrifice. While all but erasing the Indigenous presence, Lightfoot’s song nonetheless offers two provocative proposals: that violence is central to settler relations with the land and that resource extraction and transport express that violence.

Metaphors of flow also proliferate in the rhetoric of resource politics, notably in images of the obstruction and release of flows. The present volume, for example, highlights flow obstructions: corporate power obstructs the flow of democracy and, by locking investments of fixed capital into fossil fuel projects, also blocks the flow of funds into green-energy infrastructure. Yet, for the western Canadian fossil fuel industry and its allies, those same projects release massive positive flows of profit and jobs. For them, protest and regulation merely obstruct flows of profit from existing and potential investments in fossil fuels (see Workman and McCormack 2015, 32).

At the same time, the obstruction of flow can be understood in more generative terms. In This Changes Everything, for example, Naomi Klein offers her vision of “Blockadia”—a global archipelago of resistance against the fossil fuel industry that includes many “resource hot spots” in Canada (2014, 298). In Canada, many of Blockadia’s more radical denizens are Indigenous peoples fighting to retain sovereignty over their traditional lands and to restore relations of reciprocity and stewardship. In the face of an icy-hearted world-gone-windigo, Indigenous activists obstruct its arterial corridors—pipelines, rails, and roads. But stilling this monster’s heart is also a generative act: it makes a greener, more democratic and communitarian world possible. Similar arguments have been made about the potential of Indigenous blockades and occupations to generate a sense of solidarity and political energy in ongoing struggles for Indigenous sovereignty (Belanger and Lackenbauer 2014; Napoleon 2010).

This chapter explores material flows in relationship to power and violence in resource extraction. Beyond the product-in-transformation, the flows at stake include the resources and energy needed for extraction and transportation, the labour force, the wastes released, and materially embodied networks of communication. Flows run to and from nodes of production via transportation and communication infrastructure. These flows do more than supply and relieve individual nodes: they link any one node to others, as well as to the chain’s or network’s surroundings, and therefore form part of the architecture that binds together the chain or network itself. As this chapter will argue, the geography of contestation depends on this underlying geography of flow.

This proposal stands on solid precedents in macroeconomics and in the sociology of work. Interest in the materiality of flow and in diagnosing the macroeconomic consequences of flow imbalances can be traced back at least to the physiocratic model of circulation presented in François Quesnay’s Tableau économique, first published in 1758. Quesnay wrote from the assumption that, in material terms, agriculture rather than labour was the source of all wealth, a claim that both reflected the low-growth dynamic of the manufacture of his age and appeared to justify the wealth of the landed aristocracy. Here, the highlight is his interest in tracing the circulation of wealth—an interest that influenced many others. It was an interest that led him to call for laisser-faire—the free movement of goods and wealth—a call that drew attention to the manifold flow obstructions.

Flows of physical materials and goods arguably require more attention to physical and geographic conditions. In volume 2 of Capital, Marx’s attention to the materiality of capital flows is particularly evident in his account, in chapter 8, of fixed capital as distinct from circulating capital. It is also evident in his reflections on the application of his reproduction schemas in the context of “social production”—a future collective economy without markets—and not merely in capitalist production (see Marx [1978] 1992, 434, 470). Although the practicalities of transport are largely absent from his analysis, Wassily Leontief’s input-output modelling—extensions of Marx’s reproduction schemas—emphasize the problems of balance and imbalance in relation to material flows (see, especially, Leontief 1936, 1937; see also Harvey 2013, 320–21).

Some macroeconomic theorists, notably John Maynard Keynes (1936) and Michal Kalecki (1939), have focused instead on flows of income and capital, particularly in the context of national economies. While still dependent on material infrastructure, such flows are relatively abstract, and their movements are largely independent of spatial constraints.¹ Especially in the decades since the publication of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), however, other analysts have continued to focus on flows of physical materials, stressing the need to achieve balance and proportionality among such flows, particularly in the face of the depletion of natural resources (see, for example, Daly and Cobb 1989; Brown 2001). The macroeconomic consequences of material imbalances in relation to resource requirements and industrial waste form a core theme in Marina Fischer-Kowalski’s materials flow analyses (Fischer-Kowalski 1998; Fischer-Kowalski and Hüttler 1998), as well as in late Soviet centralized economic planning.

It is only with yet other authors, however, that we see sustained attention to the fixed geographies associated with the transportation of specific materials and with the coordination of material flows. Some of these analysts work in the Canadian staples tradition (for example, Drache 1996; Watkins 2006), while others focus on the logistics of supply-chain management (for example, Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Trace 2001). These approaches attend to the practical orchestration of material flows, especially in relation to transportation and communication infrastructure, which in turn directs attention to the implications should this orchestration fail and disruptions of flow occur. Some of the more radical logistics literature (see Cowen 2010; Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness 2018) explores the political significance of the obstruction of flows and the political and security issues associated with maintaining “free” flows.

The Trans Mountain Expansion Project

As I write, tropes of flow obstruction and release are proliferating around “pipeline politics” in western Canada, in connection with the transportation of both diluted bitumen and liquefied natural gas (LNG). In early February 2020, protests erupted across the country in response to the RCMP’s heavily armed clearance of blockades on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in north-central British Columbia so that construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline could continue (Canadian Press 2020a)—a sequence of flow-disrupting political actions that requires separate analysis. Following the 2016 demise of another highly contested project, Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, bitumen politics soon came to centre on the Trans Mountain Expansion project. The expansion would roughly triple the quantity of bitumen already flowing along the existing Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta, to a storage and loading terminal in Burnaby, British Columbia. From there, tankers would take the diluted bitumen past a sensitive, island-studded coastline and then out to sea. New but uncertain Asian markets have been the project’s main advertised objective, although the ongoing role of American markets may be understated.

Since its initial public announcement, in February 2012, the Trans Mountain project has survived multiple challenges, including abandonment by the original proponent, US-based Kinder Morgan, and purchase by the Canadian government at a cost of about $4.5 billion in 2018. Several First Nations along both the coast and the project corridor have asserted their rights and interests against it. Environmental groups with varied agendas on the coast and along its interior route have targeted the project as a local menace and as a signal contributor to climate change. Stoutly supported at the outset by the Conservative federal government of Stephen Harper, the project nonetheless met with opposition across a broad section of the political spectrum in coastal British Columbia. Yet, despite public criticism, the project passed review by the National Energy Board and was approved by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in late November 2016 (at the same time that the Northern Gateway project was scuttled).

But controversy surrounding the project had only begun. First Nations, both on the coast and along the pipeline corridor, asserted their rights and interests against the project, at the same time that environmental groups raised alarms about potential spills and targeted the project as a signal contributor to climate change. During the provincial election campaign in May 2017, the BC New Democratic Party (NDP) government, under the leadership of John Horgan, promised that it would insist on further research and investment in spill cleanup capacity before allowing the project to proceed. The government further argued in court—ultimately unsuccessfully—that the province had a constitutional right to regulate the transport of bitumen within its borders in the interests of the local environment.²

By the spring of 2018, delays were driving up costs, prompting Kinder Morgan to announce, in April, that it would withdraw funding for the project at the end of May unless an agreement could be reached that would allow construction to proceed. On May 29, 2018, Ottawa announced a buyout to ensure that the pipeline would be built—“an investment in Canada’s future,” according to Minister of Finance Bill Morneau, who declined to estimate what the eventual cost would be to the Canadian public (Harris 2018; see also Tencer 2018). At the time, Kinder Morgan’s own estimate of the total cost of construction was $7.4 billion—a cost that, by February 2020, had escalated to a projected $12.6 billion (Kapelos and Tasker 2020).

In the meanwhile, lawsuits had been filed both by BC First Nations and by environmental groups in response to the government’s November 2016 decision to approve the project. On August 30, 2018, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld these challenges, ruling that the federal government’s process of consultation had been inadequate (see Bellrichard 2018) and its environmental assessment incomplete. The government was thus obliged to undertake a supplementary round of consultations as well as to address the environmental shortcomings. The government complied, and the Trans Mountain project was subsequently reapproved, in June 2019. A new challenge was then brought, by a number of the original First Nations applicants, again on the grounds of inadequate consultation.³ On February 4, 2020, however, the Federal Court of Appeal rejected this new challenge (Canadian Press 2020b), thereby closing down one avenue of opposition.

The project has, however, enjoyed the support of successive governments in Alberta. In the spring of 2018, Rachel Notley’s NDP government, in an ongoing effort to avoid alienating business interests, threatened to cut oil and gas deliveries to British Columbia unless the latter permitted construction of the pipeline to proceed (Morgan 2018). This threat was backed by her government’s passage of legislation empowering the province to place restrictions on its exports—legislation not formally proclaimed until May 2019, after mid-April provincial elections brought the United Conservative Party (UCP) government of Jason Kenney to power. BC holds Alberta’s law to be unconstitutional (Williams 2019).⁴ Kenney also repealed the Notley government’s climate legislation (which had previously been criticized as insufficiently robust) and, in December 2019, established the UCP’s $30-million Canadian Energy Centre (popularly described as its “war room”) to counter environmentalist and Indigenous criticism of Alberta’s fossil fuel industry (Anderson 2019).

Even if the hour may thus be too late for those who would stop the Trans Mountain Expansion, the struggle is far from over. Major international investors have for the most part withdrawn their investments in oil sands projects, while scientific reports continue to stress the need for a radical and rapid transition away from fossil fuels, as well as Canada’s unacceptably high levels of per capita carbon emissions. In this arena of struggle, flows and possible obstructions to flow have a direct bearing not only on contending themes of profit, protest, and transition but also on the strategies adopted by the contending parties.

Flow and Infraction

With respect to the flow of bitumen, at least three broad categories of strategy exist, but only one depends on the industrial geography of production. The first is divestment: persuading investors to withdraw funding for bitumen-related projects, including pipeline construction, and for fossil fuel extraction more generally (see Rowe, Dempsey, and Gibbs 2016, as well as chapter 17 in this volume). Debating the moral legitimacy of such projects may engage the values of specific territorially bound populations, but otherwise this strategy requires little geographic analysis. For this reason, it is bracketed here.

Another type of strategy concerns conflicts among jurisdictions, as an extractive chain or network passes through a jurisdiction’s territory and thus becomes the object of its governance. In Canada, one obvious subtype involves conflict among legally constituted state jurisdictions. Examples are BC’s two recent legal challenges (discussed above) regarding jurisdiction over the flow of bitumen within and across provinces, specifically in relation to the constitutional division of powers. A second subtype involves conflicts between state jurisdictions and Indigenous authority. In BC, a province in which most First Nations never negotiated treaties with the Canadian state, jurisdictional claims flow from the recognition of Aboriginal title.⁵ Regardless of subtype, however, legal strategies founded on competing claims to authority over the space occupied by an extractive chain or network are only tangentially connected to how the struggle proceeds on the ground. Consequently, such strategies are also bracketed here.

A third anti-pipeline strategy type, material obstruction, appears to be growing in its frequency of application. Here, the operations of the extractive chain or network itself become the terrain of struggle, not merely its rationale or objective. One such corridor ends at the mouth of the Fraser River, in suburban Vancouver. Although the expansion would alter this part of its route, the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline corridor crosses parkland and upscale neighbourhoods on Burnaby Mountain before terminating at a seaside storage facility, where tankers are then loaded. Anti-pipeline protests in this area began in the late fall of 2017, with protesters and land defenders clustering around a trailer parked near the entrance to the construction site—the origins of what came to be called “Camp Cloud.” On March 10, 2018, a large Indigenous-led demonstration that included activists from resource struggles across North America marked the beginning of an organized direct-action campaign. That day, protesters and land defenders constructed a traditional Coast Salish “watch house” near the trailer and lit a sacred fire that would be kept burning continuously. In defiance of a March court injunction ordering protesters to stay away from the construction site, the campaign—punctuated by arrests and charges of criminal contempt—continued until August, when the BC Supreme Court issued a second injunction ordering protesters to dismantle Camp Cloud.

The Tsleil-Waututh Nation, whose lands lie adjacent to the terminus, has provided important leadership in this campaign, working alongside other Vancouver-area First Nations. Their efforts have been joined by First Nations elsewhere along BC’s coastlines and in the interior. Echoing the obstruction strategy of the long-standing Unist’ot’en Camp in central British Columbia (see Unist’ot’en Camp 2017), the Tiny House Warrior movement of the Secwepemc Nation, whose lands lie in south-central BC, has undertaken the construction of a series of small houses intended to prevent the Trans Mountain Pipeline corridor from crossing unceded Secwepemc territory.⁶ First Nations with analogous stakes have in the past obstructed transportation corridors such as those associated with the Keystone XL, Enbridge Northern Gateway, and Energy East pipelines. The resulting networks have generated a dense environment for mutual support and strategic exchange not only among First Nations but also between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous environmental groups.

Environmental organizations have long appreciated First Nations’ vested interest in safeguarding the integrity of their traditional lands, as well as their superior legal leverage, and authority in resource matters. However frustrating and limited “Aboriginal rights” can be for Indigenous peoples under Canadian constitutional rulings, this difference in leverage can become important for interactions between environmental movements and First Nations. Most BC First Nations retain rights and duties to the land, even under settler constitutional and common law, that settler environmentalists do not have and that many other First Nations in Canada appear to have ceded in the eyes of Canadian law.⁷ Freehold tenure is not a constitutional right like Aboriginal and treaty rights, for example; in many parts of the country, freehold tenure specifically excludes subsurface resources, while Aboriginal title does not. Recent settler court decisions have attached growing significance to those rights, though not without limitation, especially since the 1997 Supreme Court ruling on Delgamuukw. Supplementary decisions then followed, including the 2004 Haida Nation and Taku River Tlingit cases, as well as the 2014 Tsilhqot’in case. The Haida case established that both federal and provincial governments had obligations to consult that could not be delegated to third parties. The Tsilhqot’in decision included a statement from the courts that rejected the doctrine of terra nullius in Canadian law (see para. 69), notwithstanding its practical application over decades in government policy.

These facts co-exist with extensive and expensive procedural delays and obstacles, as well as judicial limitations on the practical meaning of Aboriginal rights. The Taku River Tlingit ruling established a major limitation on the duty to consult in Canadian law, namely that it did not extend to a duty to reach agreement. These court decisions have also never questioned Crown sovereignty claims in relation to Indigenous sovereignty (for example Tsilhqot’in 2014, para. 69–70). Moreover, inequalities in real power have privileged government and industry interests in eliminating these rights through forced negotiation. These practical limitations have driven some First Nations to negotiate an end to their Aboriginal title, typically in exchange for money and benefits compensation and some more conventional land rights. Tensions have emerged in many communities between Indian Act councils willing to sign such agreements and traditional leaderships. Still, in tactical terms, the existence of this jurisprudence can still link the second obstruction strategy type to the third, particularly prior to the opening of such negotiations.

Some earlier environmental campaigns rested on admirably respectful relations. But in response to Indigenous objections to notably disrespectful or ill-informed relations, many environmental organizations have had to make important adjustments in their approach. As the March 10, 2018, Trans Mountain protest suggests, this situation may be changing (see, for example, Berman 2018), with environmentalists now often seeking to signal heightened deference to Indigenous leadership, procedures, and conceptions of justice. Locally grounded actions, such as blockades, bring people together, both literally and figuratively, it may be that strategies involving material obstruction have helped to foster this growing sense of collaboration.

Toward a Strategic Geography of Obstruction

As suggested earlier, resource-extractive operations most closely resemble chains or networks and, as such, are geographically distinctive. Although they occupy only very small amounts of land, thereby limiting the area directly under corporate control, such chains frequently traverse broad expanses of territory, cutting across national and other jurisdictional boundaries. Their configuration on the land tends to be relatively linear, consisting of concentrated nodes of activity connected by sometimes lengthy transportation corridors along which flow people, equipment, and the product itself. For opponents, this structural linearity invites targeted intervention tactics that can produce cascading effects both upstream and downstream.

The fact that an intervention could, in theory, occur anywhere along the chain inevitably raises the question of why strategic actions take place where they do. Why, for example, did protests against the Trans Mountain pipeline centre on the Burnaby terminus rather than upstream at Fort McMurray or somewhere else? Similarly, why were protests against the Petronas LNG project centred almost exclusively on the proposed terminal at Lelu Island, not far south of Prince Rupert? After all, protests against clearcutting—such as the 1990s “War in the Woods” in Clayoquot Sound—typically focused on the site of extraction, namely, the forests themselves, rather than on sawmills or lumberyards. So why, in the case of oil and gas, do coastal terminals seem to be the preferred targets? More generally, what determines the locations along a given resource-extractive chain that will emerge as sites of protest?

One factor is, of course, the location of those whose livelihoods, lands, and lifeways are most immediately under threat. The Trans Mountain protests at Burnaby were, for example, spearheaded by local Coast Salish peoples, while Lelu Island is the traditional territory of the Gitwilgyoots, a Lax Kw’alaams tribe, who were joined in their struggle against Petronas by both commercial and sport fishers.⁸ Similarly, Clayoquot Sound is the traditional home of two Nuu-chah-nulth bands, as well as a popular tourist and recreation site. In other words, struggles may simply break out in places where local residents have reasons for opposition.

Another possible factor is the degree to which the concerns surrounding a project focus on a particular site. The Petronas project met with little opposition, for instance, until alarms were raised about the potential environmental and economic impacts of a LNG terminal specifically at Lelu Island—located, as it is, in the ecologically sensitive Skeena River estuary so vital to the salmon fishery. In contrast, logging-road protests typically emphasized the impact of the logging industry on the forest overall. Similarly, in addition to local concerns, pipeline protests often address issues that extend far beyond the route of the pipeline itself. Moreover, despite relentless stress on the environmental degradation wrought at or near sites of bitumen extraction, only limited, symbolic, and generally non-confrontational actions, such as the former Tar Sands Healing Walk (Leahy 2014), have taken place at such sites. For the most part, then, sites of protest seem only loosely related to the geographic scope of the concern.

A third possible factor is the influence of precedent. One thinks of iconic sites of protest such as the logging roads of the 1980s and 1990s or the coal mine entrances at which striking workers assembled. The possibility that a “trend-setting” site will emerge surely deserves investigation, yet clearly not all issues generate such a shared site of protest.

While such factors may shed light on which protest sites become popular, recent comparisons across chains suggest an additional line of inquiry. Resource-extractive chains or networks may become vulnerable to intervention at specific points owing to the particularities of the work process. Timothy Mitchell (2011) compares coal to conventional oil from the standpoint of the relative effectiveness of coal miners and oil workers in making demands for reform. Given that miners worked directly at the site of extraction, producing the coal itself, striking coal miners could easily obstruct coal flows and subsequently release them—a power of obstruction, he argues, that placed miners at the vanguard of organized labour and of democratic struggle. In contrast, the flow of oil is not so easily interrupted, and the production process is also more complex. As Mitchell (2011, 144) observes, oil has to be “recovered from beneath the ground, stored in tanks, processed in treatment plants, pumped into pipelines, loaded onto tankers and transported across oceans.”

Mitchell also points out that British coal served nearby markets, with the result that the buyers could press directly for settlements when strikes broke out. Oil, by contrast, generally has offshore customers (and sometimes foreign owners as well): threats to extractive flows thus require greater transnational, transcultural, and translingual coordination. Finally, work processes favoured organizing by coal miners but not by oil riggers. Room-and-pillar coal mining required intense worker collaboration underground, where workers were hidden from managerial oversight. In addition, miners and their families tended to cluster in homes near the pits, creating intergenerational communities of support. By contrast, conventional oil crews form anew with each project, with workers often housed in temporary camps, and operate above ground under eagle-eyed supervisors.

These patterns are, of course, imperfect: not all coal miners struck successfully, while some oil and gas workers have (Nore and Turner 1981; Wanderley, Mokrani, and Guimaraes 2012). But these examples do suggest that certain flashpoints emerge and prove effective because of the manner in which the work process is organized, as well as the capacity of managers and/or the state to exercise surveillance.

Flow analysis may also suggest why sites that are divorced from the sites of immediate concern can still prove useful to protesters and land defenders (as we will see in the discussion of logistics below). The material flows that allow a geographically dispersed work process to succeed necessarily mediate power both upstream and downstream; intervention on the part of fossil fuel opponents can “piggyback” on this existing power (see also Bernstein and Cashore 2007; Cashore, Auld, and Newsom 2004; Lawson 2009). Much like coal miners, Indigenous and environmental protesters can focus not only on sites associated with specific grievances but also on those least vulnerable to corporate or police surveillance—that is, on sites where protesters enjoy an organizational advantage.

In sum, a clear understanding of the production process and the relations of power associated with it is important not merely in connection with corporate concerns, such as the maximization of efficiency or profit (the focus of much mainstream supply-chain research), or with respect to the implications for public concerns such as climate change or damage to local ecosystems. Above all, these processes and power dynamics need to be understood in the context of the struggle itself, with a view to assessing the strategic potential of disrupting them. Disruption may involve labour relations or relations with interests external to the chain or network. As a strategic terrain, each chain or network thus exhibits a distinctive logic for contention, just as the configuration of a chessboard shapes the playing of the game. The logic underlying the terrain may determine where conflicts or tensions are apt to arise, and, with careful analysis, contenders may also be able to identify especially advantageous sites.

Accordingly, in what follows, I focus on analyzing flows of material along resource chains or networks. Again, these flows require study not merely because they pose an important environmental policy problem in their own right. They demand attention because of the potential of their obstruction or diversion to alter the balance of power in policy debates.

Reading Power Through Chain and Network Literatures

That the technical and economic aspects of material flows, flow obstruction, and other work relations simultaneously entail power relations is not a new claim (see Braverman 1974; Rueschemeyer 1986; Cleaver [1979] 2000). But it does suggest a principle for selective reading of existing chain or network research (on which see Bair 2005; Lawson 2009). Each of the following frameworks emphasizes distinctive features about chains or networks; a limited subset emphasizes different dimensions of chain or network power.

Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1986) commodity-chain analysis and the global production network (GPN) literature (Henderson et al. 2002; Hess and Yeung 2006) consider power in labour relations, together with interfirm exchanges and transfers. Hopkins and Wallerstein relate levels of extra-economic coercion to the locations of particular nodes in the commodity chain within the capitalist world system. For Jeffrey Henderson, Martin Hess, and their colleagues, a GPN is a site for (among other things) producing and transferring economic value. This suggests a specifically Marxist reading of GPN power, since value in that tradition implies labour exploitation.

Supply-chain management and global commodity chain (GCC) analyses emphasize power as governance, in a specific era of outsourcing and offshoring, rising interfirm managerial authority, and integrated communications technologies (Gereffi 1994; Lambert 2001). Initially attuned to the chain leadership of particular firms at particular nodes (Gereffi 1994), authors concerned with GCCs later contributed to global value chain (GVC) analysis (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). This hybrid approach drew special attention to the location of monopoly rents (including resource rents) in explaining interfirm governance relations as well as differentiated experiences of globalization (see, for example, Kaplinsky 1998).

GPN and GVC analyses both consider two interpenetrating flow types: material flows for production (labour and material inputs, including energy sources and catalytic materials); and abstract flows (value and rents) that pass through the material flows, providing for profitable production and growth.

Like supply-chain management research, logistics research, both business oriented (Lambert 2001) and critical (Cowen 2010), emphasizes material flow and its governance. As we have seen, one governance practice, stockpiling, historically served several purposes. First, rates and rhythms of work varied between nodes, with conditions at one node creating knock-on effects for its neighbours. Second, means, rhythms, and rates of transport varied between nodes and among different flow types. Third, strikes and accidental interruptions at one node necessarily created pressures on efficiency and profitability elsewhere. Finally, stockpiles provided convenient sites for public and private governance, such as quality control, inventory, and taxation.

The logistics revolution of the late twentieth century, including numerically controlled monitoring, just-in-time (JIT) systems, and intermodal containerization, dramatically enhanced profitability (see Lambert 2001; Bonacich and Wilson 2008, chap. 1). It diminished the practical day-to-day value of large stockpiles and generally accelerated the passage of goods and therefore the turnover time. Yet this made flow efficiency and thus profitability all the more vulnerable to unanticipated interruptions. Accordingly, supply-chain management increasingly required enhanced managerial control over potentially disruptive forces, such as migrant labour and workers at border operations (Walia 2010; Cowen 2010).

Implications of Frontier Extraction

Beyond these insights from chain and network literatures, at least three additional points concern the special circumstances of frontier extractive sites. First, much chain or network literature either neglects fixed-capital formation or assumes that such capital already exists. The same applies to management’s prior need to establish the very possibility of extracting useful materials profitably. But frontier locations often require both kinds of investment before production can begin or a labour force, with its day-to-day needs, can move in and take root.

Fossil fuel extraction tends to be relatively capital intensive and high cost wherever it occurs. This has become all the more true as fossil fuels have grown scarcer and harder to extract, requiring sophisticated technology, and as extraction revives in the Global North (Kellogg 2015). Frontier locations increase this expense. Longer distances and more challenging terrain typically add to per-unit transportation costs, while distance from population centres makes it more difficult to attract and maintain a work force. As Andreas Malm (2016) noted, the historical shift from water-powered rural mills to coal-powered urban factories occurred partly because densely populated areas offered independent capitalist producers an abundant supply of workers in need of employment.

The expense associated with frontier extraction also has certain implications with respect to the exercise of state power. The sheer size of the capital investments needed to set up extractive operations in remote locations tends to privilege large, multinational corporations and to encourage monopoly or oligopoly ownership. This situation may then require state intervention in the form of oversight and regulation. At the same time, increased expenses on the frontier, including above-average wage rates to address the high cost of living, may also stimulate state subsidy or other forms of publicly funded support.⁹

Consideration of cost notwithstanding, waves of extractive capital accumulation, at least on northern resource frontiers, typically display three distinct stages:

1. Technological innovations, geological surveys, and engineering research: these initial activities demonstrate that, with the right combination of technology and technique, hard-to-reach resources can in fact be profitably exploited.
2. Investments of fixed capital in the construction of infrastructure needed for specific nodes of production and social reproduction along the chain or for the transportation and communication corridors that connect nodes.
3. Routine extraction, processing, and transport of the resource.

Several observations can be made about these stages. First, temporal gaps between the stages can open possibilities for disruption. For instance, although extractive operations often use the same transportation network (such as a river system or railway) both to bring equipment, labour, and supplies to the extraction site and to bring out the resulting product (such as timber or wheat) this was not the case for Alberta bitumen. There, the outbound product (created at stage 3) was to be shipped through pipelines, rather than along the same highway used for inbound capital equipment and workers—and, since there was no immediate need for the pipelines, their construction (stage 2) was planned for later. With so much capital already tied up in the infrastructure built at the extraction sites, however, companies became vulnerable to tactics aimed at further delaying pipeline construction. Opponents found this to be an effective means of disruption: the delay prevented companies from bringing their product to market, while, in the meanwhile, costs of materials and labour continued to rise.

In addition, time lags at one node can delay (or accelerate) the realization of fixed-capital investments already complete at other nodes. Éric Pineault and David Murray (2016) draw special attention to such asymmetric time lags in fixed-capital investments for the Energy East bitumen pipeline proposal. Extractive and upgrading nodes were built up first. Pressure then rose to complete the remaining capital investments, chiefly relating to pipeline capacity, to ensure the profitability of extractive and upgrading investments already complete or underway. This only encouraged industry opponents to delay the pipelines.

A second point about stage differentiation concerns the integration of chain or network governance. Briefly, chains vary both in the degree of integration of the stages (and their component elements) into single business plans and in the number of firms involved in any such plans. Breaking up responsibility for planning the different stages may impair chain coherence, but it also may have its uses. Bankruptcy sales or sales at a loss may lessen the burden on firms operating at later stages to realize the full value that others built up in early stages. For now, however, the central strategic point is that both time lags and divisions in leadership across the stages do emerge and have real consequences.

A final point concerns the impact of frontier extractive sites on the spatial configuration of a resource chain or network. The earliest GPN literature rightly argued that the complexity of much contemporary production suggests a “network” rather than a “chain” (Henderson et al. 2002). But, in contrast to the nodes in urban manufacturing networks, frontier extractive sites are spatially distant from other nodes, and the often lengthy connecting corridors between them tend to privilege a certain linearity. As a result, the overall pattern of the infrastructure on the landscape more closely resembles a chain than a network. Moreover, because constructing transportation and communication corridors over long distances and/or rugged terrain is expensive and can be technically difficult, these corridors tend to be relatively few in number (although they may multiply if the resource is extensive and/or extraction prolonged or if multiple destinations become important to profitability).

Flow Imbalance as a Generator and Object of Power Relations

What, then, can be said about flow obstruction and release as expressions of power in fossil fuel extractive chains? This section zeroes in on underlying imperatives to establish and maintain proportionality among related material flows over a period of time, if capitalist production is to be sustained profitably. Here, proportionality refers to a set ratio between different material inputs relative to a given quantity of output. A variation in the quantity of output generally requires a proportional change in the quantity of all the inputs, not merely a change in the quantity of some of them. In a linked series or chain of production processes, balance refers to the changes required elsewhere along the chain when such a variation occurs at one point or node in the chain.

In capitalist production, flow proportionality depends on the specific materials and labour that particular production steps require of one another, as well as on the value and rents that those materials bear. One imperative that drives proportionality is based on simple chemistry and physics, as these operate under given technological and organizational conditions. Producing a given volume and type of concrete, for example, will require the combination of specific quantities of lime, gravel, and other materials, and in a specific number of cement mixers of a certain size. A second imperative that becomes important along a chain that is not vertically integrated rests on the principle (however compromised) of equal exchange in market prices and, as some argue, underlying value flows. Thus, for a set combination of cement mixers, lime, gravel, and other materials, plus the needed type and size of work force, a general understanding will emerge in the cement trade about how much money will typically have to flow out to the providers of these various inputs and about how much income the resulting stretch of sidewalks or of foundation walls will yield.

In places and periods of relative stability, these relationships can be worked out arithmetically, in ledgers and work plans, with a reasonable degree of predictability. But the reasons that balance and proportionality stand in the ratios that they do are specific, enduring physical and societal conditions, which in turn compel particular spatio-temporal patterns for operations (Harvey 2013, 267–86; Lawson 2011).

Particular resource chains or networks could hardly internalize such equilibria and proportions fully, given the importance of fuel and other resources to the wider economy. Outside supplements to (or deductions from) their flows are integral to their operation and require integrated analysis: examples include taxes and tax credits, private-sector transfer pricing, and fiat pricing for royalties. These “articulations” (see Wolpe 1980) may arise as unintended side effects of routine activities or as expressions of the interest that wider capitalist networks, civil-societal initiatives, and political forces have in a chain or network’s activities. But even given the possibility of sustaining internal disproportions through such articulations, certain workable patterns are likely necessary to sustain overall chain or network activity.

These patterns matter, and not only for workable production arrangements. It is against the imperatives of balance, proportionality, and symmetry that the introduction of imbalance, disproportion, and asymmetry may acquire disruptive strategic significance. Such disruptions may arise spontaneously from structural contradiction or incoherence or as the consequences (intended or unintended) of intentional acts. Flow imbalance is an important indicator and generator of social inequalities, hierarchical control, and ecological domination, but the introduction of disruptive imbalance can foreshadow or directly trigger democratizing, emancipatory, and pro-ecological counter-power.

Taking the foregoing observations into account, a strategic and power-sensitive research agenda should consider at least three contexts for flow balance and imbalance, obstruction and release.

Within the Ordinary Extractive Stage of Existing Chains or Networks

Power relations and capacities (economic and political) can arise from flow imbalances along established extractive chains or networks. The patterns, as well as chain or network vulnerability to them, are likely to vary by case. They arise spatially, most clearly from the arrangement of the physical environment and built infrastructure established in the two previous stages, and temporally, from such routine work rhythms as turnover times and volumes, daily and seasonal rhythms, capital depreciation rates, and rates of material flows. This type of variation is crucial to the differences in capitalist and labour organizing for conventional oil, coal, and water power (see above).

Dysfunctional bottlenecks and shortfalls arise organically from incompatible rates and rhythms of material flow at the various nodes and entrepôts, and along different transportation corridors. (As we will see below, these are also a concern during fixed-capital formation.) Stockpiling is a simple mechanism responding to this diversity, whether planned or arising organically from routine operations. Supply management reflects more intentional, sophisticated responses. JIT supply-chain management is still more sophisticated intervention in flow rates and rhythms, to reduce the unprofitable stockpiling of value-bearing materials. However, the added vulnerability of JIT management to unexpected interruptions (intended or accidental) encourages costly investment in heightened managerial control and policing of potential disruptions.

Often, managerial intervention at just one point in the chain can also resolve imbalances, whether through modification of existing machinery and reorganization (or “debottlenecking”: see Suncor 2014) or through targeted “patches” of capital intensification through the application of higher technology (see Samuel 1977). Either technique extends the useful life of older nodes or corridors. But intentionally introducing technological or organizational heterogeneity into the chain or network may then introduce fresh imbalances with socioeconomic and political consequences. High-tech innovation rents may emerge at the “patches,” empowering the firms based there and shifting overall interfirm power relations (see Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). New “high-tech” workers at such patches may lack solidarity with surrounding “low-tech” workers at other locations. Patterns of outsourcing versus vertical integration might change, as new leading firms assess the optimal institutional arrangements for their newfound power. That in turn would alter the institutional bases for supply-chain management.

Between Major Stages in Chain or Network Life

The latter points suggest larger patterns of unevenness that implicate earlier chain or network stages. First, as is well known, resource-extractive investment, like capital investment generally, commonly comes in distinct waves rather than incrementally; the global commodities boom of the early 2000s is an example. Second, as mentioned above, resource-investment waves often exhibit at least three stages: research establishing a new pattern of profitable resource extraction; fixed-capital investment in a definite series of production sites and corridors; and routine extraction.

Thinking of resource-extractive chains in terms of multi-stage waves has certain implications:

• Degrees of stage separation: More profound time lags between stages generally heighten the risk profile for returns on early-stage investments within a given wave. Higher risks can increase pressures for state or other collective action as well as for disruptive strategic interventions.
• Political-economic asymmetries within and between the stages: Each stage requires appropriate financing, material inputs, and labour force and therefore exhibits distinct levels of capital, labour, rent, and land intensity. Each generates distinctive products (in broad terms, geological and engineering services, fixed-capital assemblages, and resource commodities, respectively) and distinct degrees of product commodification.

  Each stage may therefore display distinct business and political salience, and the combination of stages may form a distinct pattern for a particular chain or network. GVC research has already recommended competitive positioning at rent-rich nodes (Kaplinsky 1998). But some fossil fuel chains or networks are also relatively job rich at particular stages and job poor in others, as with fixed capital and ordinary extraction stages for bitumen steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), relative to the equivalent stages in bitumen strip mining. Governments pressed for job creation therefore likely derive disproportionate benefits from stimulating job-intensive stages. This could force growth at one stage out of rational alignment with the others.

• Variations in the mode by which products from one stage become inputs for the next: Are these sold on open markets, transferred between tightly related firms at nominal rates, or simply forwarded between subunits within a single firm or firm alliance (see Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005)? Are pipelines and other transportation corridors common carriers or (at the limit), as monopoly services for the firms that own them, based at the extractive or upgrading sites? To what extent does the common-carrier pattern coincide with separate corridor ownership?

Between Nodes and Corridors During Research and Fixed-Capital Construction

The fixed-capital infrastructures for resource extraction, transportation, upgrading, storage, and so on, are rarely built simultaneously or even in a tightly coordinated sequence governed by a single business plan or several closely linked ones.

Undoubtedly, practical construction considerations and business competence play roles in the coherence or incoherence of sequencing, as does whether transportation infrastructure is organized as a monopolized asset, as a single common carrier, or as multiple competing lines. Some variation may also involve corporate responses to regulation. For instance, deliberately presenting construction to regulators in separate stages and/or by separate proponents can block consideration of full life-cycle analysis and cumulative effects (Princen 2002) or ensure that project sections come before the most sympathetic regulatory venues (Pralle 2006; Jang 2017). Outsourcing sections of the whole chain’s fixed-capital construction can similarly distance firms from upstream or downstream responsibilities while maintaining control over profitability and lead-firm authority over the wider chain (Princen 2002). All such strategies must be measured against the transaction costs involved in breaking up chain authority (see Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Finally, all of the above factors have implications for managerial and strategic exercises of power: they are factors that affect the potential threats to the expected return on invested fixed capital by further disrupting the construction sequence, just as they affect measures to police and prevent such disruptions.

Some of these sociopolitical patterns are arguably evident in the history of Alberta bitumen, which has exhibited marked waves of investment and, within them, discrete research, fixed-capital formation, and extractive stages. For example, in the mid- to late 1990s, Premier Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative government stimulated fixed-capital and consumer-fund investment at Alberta bitumen-extractive sites through deregulation, reduced resource royalties, and other policies. The purpose of these initiatives was ostensibly to restart the provincial economy and especially to increase jobs, not to prepare for a defined foreseeable level of long-term demand for the final chain product, bitumen. Many of the private actors implicated in this stage had similarly little at stake in the extractive stage to follow. Alberta also had the most direct jurisdiction over specific nodes of the final extractive chain, those directly connected with resource-bearing lands. Interprovincial and international trade—and, thus, transport of saleable bitumen—was more clearly federal. Finally, unlike some other resource-extractive chains, outbound transportation for the bitumen required separate infrastructure from inbound transportation for inputs in fixed-capital construction—respectively, pipelines and rail versus (overburdened) highways and airports.

Extractive capacity therefore arguably moved well ahead of pipeline capacity (and consumer-fund capacity in the extractive region). That capacity also built up according to imperatives that did not line up with final demand for the saleable bitumen, either in overall quantities or at the (mainly American) end of existing and anticipated pipeline corridors. All of this arguably heightened the stakes for any further pipeline delays. It opened the door to critics of pipeline obstruction, and indeed for much broader elite demands to accelerate and expand pipeline construction.

Conclusion

Many environmental critiques of modern capitalist relations with non-human (or extra-human) nature stress the functional and physical linearity of material flows. Matter necessary for production is drawn from hinterlands into social production, and transformed matter is then ejected elsewhere, either post-production or post-consumption, for non-human nature to metabolize. Both radical critiques, such as Foster’s (2009, 161–200) elaboration on Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” and more reform-minded life-cycle analyses (Brown 2001) stress the interdependent dangers of resource depletion and “waste” disposal.

A kind of balance or proportionality to material flows, on the one hand, and value and rent flows, on the other, is nonetheless essential to extractive and disposal activities, as it is for the economic system as a whole. In part, flow balance and proportionality are physically and unavoidably determined (as with chemical transformations); in part, they are the product of managerial orchestration, including the obstruction and release of flows. Whether disruptions or imbalance emerge organically from structural contradictions and incoherence or are deliberately provoked as strategic interventions (also often in the form of obstruction or release), they merit our attention.

Regimes of obstruction are institutionalized modes of blocking departures from fossil fuel use and from corporate power. This chapter grounds an understanding of the foundations of these regimes in the complex processes that extract, refine, and transport carbon-based fuels. It also highlights the potential vulnerabilities of these regimes presented by certain characteristics of these processes, and it seeks to understand the possibilities and conditions of counter-obstruction that arise on the strength of those vulnerabilities. Interventions from actors detached from core chain operations may be more effective, and flashpoints of contention over chain or network power may be more transformative at points where corporate power is weakest and counter-powers are strongest, or at points where policy concerns (such as visible pollution) are most acute, or at points associated with broader patterns of protest.

But this chapter has suggested another explanatory factor that may be at work: the balances and imbalances, the blockages and bottlenecks, and the intentional or inadvertent obstruction and release of production flows. Actors situated within the chain—management and labour—as well as those located outside it may piggyback their purposes on flow processes that originate within the chain.

This analysis does not mean that contention over fossil fuels reduces to the conditions along these material corridors. Nor does it argue for studying these chains or networks in isolation from wider economic patterns. Rather, it emphasizes the explanatory potential of flow asymmetries, blockages, or bottlenecks in fuel-extractive work processes with respect to power relations, and it draws attention both to their rhythms and syncopations and to their geography.

Corporate interests profit from long-term investments in current energy systems, and they use their power to manage further expansion and to block a just and green transition. But that power is not absolute: it is founded on a complex capitalist production process that is not perfectly under corporate control. The power to block and unblock flows is simultaneously a basis for disruptive counter-power, which can be mobilized to release and accelerate a just and green transition.