A powerful poem by Life After Oil member Ross Belot which was selected for the anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis. The piece captures the technical, physical, and ethical realities of working with some of the planet’s most challenging crude oils, whilst exploring the human and environmental consequences of fossil fuel extraction.
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deeply discounted, high nitrogen,
high sulphur, high heavy metals,
high naphthenic acid, high filterable
solids, Claus unit filling up,
desalter burping rag layer of
water-oil-and-solids emulsion,
metal pipes thinning, eaten
by complex mixture of cycloaliphatic
carboxylic acids & plain old
aliphatic sulphurs
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We loved it because it was hard. They loved us running it because they could place equity
production with us. We loved our equipment. We did what was needed. We pushed our equipment
to its limits with the worst oil the Earth could offer up. And then we ran some more. We didn’t care
how they got it out of the ground. We were heroes.
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Naphthenic acid corrosion is often localized, leading to pitting and grooving in metal surfaces like pipes, which can
create holes resembling Swiss cheese. This is especially problematic in areas with high fluid velocity or turbulence, where
the corrosive effects are amplified
run even more of this stuff they said & we did,
hexavalent chromium corrosion inhibitors,
metalled up the big atmospheric
and vacuum distillation units with
chromium, nickel, molybdenum, ever
more expensive alloys, we ran
feasibly, inspected metal thicknesses
regularly to avoid catastrophic failure,
so like they asked we ran the hardest stuff
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Certain types of solids can act as surfactants, migrating to the oil-water interface and stabilizing emulsion.
We did what we could and sometimes had to cut the nasty crudes out and go back to plain vanilla
crudes. That was failure, we were not loved. You couldn’t predict. They could take the bitumen out
of the sand, but they couldn’t take all the sand out of the bitumen. The oil-coated solids would form
emulsions and carry under in the desalter brine and overwhelm our water-treatment facilities. It was
not good.
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the bitumen came 2600 kilometres,
along the way it came through
breakout tanks mixed with other crudes,
sometimes tanks along the way had sludge,
sometimes they didn’t,
sometimes tanks’ mixers were working.
sometimes they weren’t,
it came and we didn’t know
what we were going to get,
sometimes we dealt with it,
sometimes we couldn’t
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On the plane coming back from Calgary’s Conference For Running Challenged Crudes someone
said to me “You might want to read this…”
Pikas with nowhere to go—too hot below, too hot where they are due to climate change. Moving further up until they
run out of mountain—
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Many of us retired. We didn’t get told any more that we were heroes. We didn’t get told any more
“way to go!” Many of us mostly played golf.
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I went to California, found myself
reading poems to refineries, went
on Refinery Healing Walks
organized by Idle No More SF Bay,
heard Indigenous leaders say the oil
wasn’t to blame for climate catastrophe,
the oil belonged to the Earth
that we had ripped it from,
we were the ones doing violence,
we were not heroes, I watched
California burn, watched the sky
turn grey and red for days, acrid
smoke stung my eyes, acrid smoke
hurt my lungs
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