While digging through old vacation photos from before the pandemic (I forgot the exact time but the metadata said June-July 2019), I ran into an interesting set of pictures I took in a village in Cepu, a rather rural district along the border between the provinces of Central and East Java. Most of these images were of an oil field run by local communities, ostensibly under a contract with Pertamina (Indonesia’s state-owned oil company), but it’s often quite difficult to tell which wells are being mined according to this official arrangement and which ones are mined illegally. I guess I’ll post some of these pictures since it’s not like I have anything better to do.
The oil field was rather deserted when I passed by, with only a few wells being manned at the time. On one hand this reflected the fact that not all of the wells were productive, but on the other hand it was also in the middle of a national holiday so maybe a large proportion of the workforce was also having some time off.
There wasn’t much machinery on display since in many cases there was hardly any machinery in use either. Old videos played in a nearby visitor centre showed the wells being worked by hand, with work gangs of around a dozen people lifting the extraction container (basically a section of pipe closed off at the bottom, like a long narrow bucket) out of the well by sheer muscle power. A few wells had ingenious contraptions where an automobile chassis was placed on blocks and one or two of the wheel rims were used as winch drums, usually being run in reverse to lift the pipe/bucket out of the well. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to take any good pictures of these.
These images left me with mixed feelings. I certainly admire the hard work and economic ingenuity of the local population, who by and large have managed to gain a fairly decent living out of these artisanal mining activities. A large part of these earnings seem to have been used to send their children to college or to the various military and civil service academies in Indonesia to improve the next generation’s economic prospects. At the same time I also can’t help noticing the environmental devastation in the immediate surroundings of these rigs, kept in check largely by the local miners’ lack of capital to scale up their operations.
I guess the landscape offers a certain kind of . . . I don’t know. Post-apocalyptic charm?
Maybe if I had been better at metaphors, I could have said these rigs reminded me of the skeletons of ancient beasts rearing forlornly towards the sky. But I’m not.
One of the rigs seemed to be more sophisticated than the others, with metal structures and some actual purpose-built (rather than jury-rigged) machinery. Maybe a commercial exploratory well, checking for deeper reservoirs that haven’t been exploited by previous mining efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries?
So yeah. Thanks for having suffered through my navel-gazing.
sillynewsboy 