This volume examines the social history of oil workers and investigates how labor relations have shaped the global oil industry during the twentieth century and today. It brings together the work of scholars from a range of disciplines, approaching the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of oil. The contributors analyze a number of key oil producing regions, including the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe and Africa.
“A book that should be read . . . Smith brings an alchemic talent to describing physical labor.” —The New York Times Book Review “Beautiful, funny, and harrowing.” – Sarah Smarsh, The Atlantic “Remarkable . . . this is the book that Hillbilly Elegy should have been.” —Kirkus Reviews A vivid window into the world of working class men set during the Bakken fracking boom in North Dakota Like thousands of restless men left unmoored in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, Michael Patrick Smith arrived in the fracking boomtown of Williston, North Dakota five years later homeless, unemployed, and desperate for a job. Renting a mattress on a dirty flophouse floor, he slept boot to beard with migrant men who came from all across America and as far away as Jamaica, Africa and the Philippines. They ate together, drank together, argued like crows and searched for jobs they couldn't get back home. Smith's goal was to find the hardest work he could do--to find out if he could do it. He hired on in the oil patch where he toiled fourteen hour shifts from summer's 100 degree dog days to deep into winter's bracing whiteouts, all the while wrestling with the demons of a turbulent past, his broken relationships with women, and the haunted memories of a family riven by violence. The Good Hand is a saga of fear, danger, exhaustion, suffering, loneliness, and grit that explores the struggles of America's marginalized boomtown workers—the rough-hewn, castoff, seemingly disposable men who do an indispensable job that few would exalt: oil field hands who, in the age of climate change, put the gas in our tanks and the food in our homes. Smith, who had pursued theater and played guitar in New York, observes this world with a critical eye; yet he comes to love his coworkers, forming close bonds with Huck, a goofy giant of a young man whose lead foot and quick fists get him into trouble with the law, and The Wildebeest, a foul-mouthed, dip-spitting truck driver who torments him but also trains him up, and helps Smith "make a hand." The Good Hand is ultimately a book about transformation--a classic American story of one man's attempt to burn himself clean through hard work, to reconcile himself to himself, to find community, and to become whole.
How is digitalization of the offshore oil industry fundamentally changing how we understand work and ways of knowing? Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor, and in doing so shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing. For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Eric Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil. What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative.
The book makes the case for process safety and provides a brief overviews of the upstream industry and of CCPS Risk Based Process Safety. The majority of the book focuses on the concepts of implementing process safety in wells, onshore, offshore, and projects. Topics include Overview of Upstream Operations; Overview of Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS); Application of RBPS in Drilling, Completions, Work-Overs & Interventions, Application of RBPS in Onshore Production, Application of RBPS in Offshore Production, Application of RBPS to Engineering Design, Installation, and Construction, Future Developments in the Field
Trends in Oil and Gas Corrosion Research and Technologies: Production and Transmission delivers the most up-to-date and highly multidisciplinary reference available to identify emerging developments, fundamental mechanisms and the technologies necessary in one unified source. Starting with a brief explanation on corrosion management that also addresses today's most challenging issues for oil and gas production and transmission operations, the book dives into the latest advances in microbiology-influenced corrosion and other corrosion threats, such as stress corrosion cracking and hydrogen damage just to name a few. In addition, it covers testing and monitoring techniques, such as molecular microbiology and online monitoring for surface and subsurface facilities, mitigation tools, including coatings, nano-packaged biocides, modeling and prediction, cathodic protection and new steels and non-metallics. Rounding out with an extensive glossary and list of abbreviations, the book equips upstream and midstream corrosion professionals in the oil and gas industry with the most advanced collection of topics and solutions to responsibly help solve today's oil and gas corrosion challenges. - Covers the latest in corrosion mitigation techniques, such as corrosion inhibitors, biocides, non-metallics, coatings, and modeling and prediction - Solves knowledge gaps with the most current technology and discoveries on specific corrosion mechanisms, highlighting where future research and industry efforts should be concentrated - Achieves practical and balanced understanding with a full spectrum of subjects presented from multiple academic and world-renowned contributors in the industry
Sets forth the many technical procedures involved in refining. Included are a new chapter on simple and complex refineries, and a revised chapter on gasoline blending, including current information on alcohol blending components.
Since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill, efforts to improve safety in the offshore oil industry have resulted in the adoption of new technological controls, increased promotion of safety culture, and the adoption of new data collection systems to improve both safety and performance. As an essential element of a positive safety culture, operators and regulators are increasingly integrating strategies that empower workers to participate in process safety decisions that reduce hazards and improve safety. While the human factors of personal safety have been widely studied and widely adopted in many high-risk industries, process safety â€" the application of engineering, design, and operative practices to address major hazard concerns â€" is less well understood from a human factors perspective, particularly in the offshore oil industry. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a workshop in January 2018 to explore best practices and lessons learned from other high-risk, high-reliability industries for the benefit of the research community and of citizens, industry practitioners, decision makers, and officials addressing safety in the offshore oil industry. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.
Reliance on natural resource revenues, particularly oil, is often associated with bad governance, corruption, and poverty. Worried about the effect of oil on Alaska, Governor Jay Hammond had a simple yet revolutionary idea: let citizens have a direct stake. The Governor's Solution features his first-hand account that describes, with brutal honesty and piercing humour, the birth of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend, which has been paid to each resident every year since 1982. Thirty years later, Hammond's vision is still influencing oil policies throughout the world. This reader, part of the Center for Global Development's Oil-to-Cash initiative, includes recent scholarly work examining Alaska's experience and how other oil-rich societies, particularly Iraq, might apply some of the lessons. It is as a powerful reminder that the combination of new ideas and determined individuals can make a tremendous difference --even in issues as seemingly complex and intractable as fighting the oil curse.
