ABSTRACT
The wellhead sits like a small silver igloo atop the blackened lava encrusted earth (Figure 12.1). Its pipes are thick and rusted and they pulsate and screech as Bjarni and his team attempt to coax up 300 degree fluid. Compressed air at 60 bars is delivered down into the directionally drilled well in an attempt to pressurize the fluids and boil them up through the wellhead – or ‘awaken’ the well, as Bjarni puts it.1 Being up here on the Hengill lava plains is visually striking, staggering even, but for the geologists at Reykjavik Energy
being attentive to how the well is responding is what matters. Bjarni turns my attention to geothermal metabolic processes; captured rainfall meanders through permeable subterranean rock, all the while reacting with magmatic heat and fluctuating pressure to phase transition between water and steam as explosions drive these fluids to the surface. This particular well, drilled in 2013, had formerly been a reinjection well but had recently been converted to a production well. I ask why we are trying to awaken it today. ‘Well, there have been many earthquakes here over the last while, both natural and from reinjection,’ says Bjarni. ‘All sorts of things are changing down there, and while we’re not really sure how, we think there’ll be some sort of response.’ The radical uncertainty of the intensive forces of the earth are constantly altering the seismic landscape, and converting, and subsequently awakening a well is one way the energy company can respond.2 Bjarni instructs me to pull my ear mufflers down as the screeching noise intensifies. The entire arrangement of well, igloo and pipes shakes and roars, intermittently yet violently, as dense, thick steam billows out from the earth. As I learn on this day,3 it takes a little encouragement to awaken a con-
verted well and trigger the first series of explosive events that possibly lead to a productive geothermal well. Wondering how the geothermal field4 has responded to recent seismic activity, both ‘natural’ and otherwise, Bjarni and his team initiate one of a range of possible interventions into the seismic landscape, an intervention they refer to as an awakening. In such a zone of seismic instability entities are constantly responding to one another. Geothermal metabolics respond to earthquakes, as fracturing rock increases permeability and hence subterranean fluid flow. Geologists respond to the earth as they try to order, or arrange, its liveliness, knowing that the earth can, in turn, respond to geological interventions in its own particular way. While these sets of interactions between geologists and earth are dynamic and emerging, they are also the result of infrastructural arrangements that are usually considered more stable. What we want to suggest in this paper is that infrastructural arrangements unfold among and between different kinds of actors as they respond to each other in seismic landscapes. Acknowledging how response-ability can be distributed across human and non-human entities has the advantage of bringing into view the binding quality of more-than-human engagements.
