I: Noordzeesluis (opening up the conceptual /material terrain_
 II: Brackish Methodologies (maybe not called this, but basically introducing the residency itself and the methods)
 III: Selective Abstraction (I can draft this section on osmotic energy, ecotonal difference, etc)
 IV: Costs of Circulation

I think we can tie together the sea lock expansion and the experiments with osmotic energy at the Afsluitdijk as questions of selective abstraction, the circulation of maritime capital, and brackishness as waste, turbulence, externalities of value. -- Sound good? super good 

If we set up the problematic of the sea locks and salinity above (1,000 words), I'm going to argue:
    - the estuarine ecotone as a membrane across which value flows 
    - osmotic energy as an example of this valorisation of ecotonal/saline difference
    - the recurrent problem of brackish water as waste material 
    - a return to the question of the sea lock and the brackish waters of the IJ

What's our concluding point? estuarine turbulence and hydrological excess as necessary foci for logistical and infrastructural critique?  


TITLE
FRED CARTER
JEFF DIAMANTI 

I: NOORDZEESLUIS


At the mouth of the IJ river connecting Amsterdam, Zaandam, and Velsen to the North Sea is an infrastructure mostly submerged beneath the waterline. Its steel and concrete protrusions out from beneath the water connect one bank on the south of the river to the north side where smokestacks exhale the molecular waste of industrial steel production. But this particular infrastructural sequence of locks, while less assuming than the smokestacks, is fundamentally central to the political hydrology of the regional, and indeed continental, economy. What it facilitates as an infrastructure is not just the movement of goods and materials uprive but more specifically the lineaments of post-Holocene circulation and its conundrums. IJmond, the largest of the three locks -- and the largest single sea lock on earth -- has sat dormant since January 2022, the month it was meant to hail a new era and scale of industrial trade for the Port of Amsterdam and inland further to the terminals of Western Europe. Technically, it works. Ecologically, it does not. 

[insert figure 1 here]  [There's an image of cormorants on the sea lock on the SD card]

Some infrastructures are loud, large, and imposing. This one strikes as minimally active compared to the smokestacks of Tata Steel or the barges churning water between the salty sea and the IJ's fresher waters, en route to the Port of Amsterdam's logistical terminals thirty kilometres upriver. Indeed the aquatic index of its work under water takes a moment to understand. Unlike the giant, eight kilometre gates protecting the southern province of Zeeland from the North Sea reclaiming its land--a series of interconnecting sluice walls against which the torrent of the sea crashes as so much tidal force--this infrastructure keeps calm the water column and its biochemichal flux. At least from above. Below, submerged into the alluvial silt of the IJ's benthic ecology, this inverted wall is congealed force shaping the field of circulation. 

Quiet and suberged, the sea locks at Ijmuiden are also unique compared to most industrial ports since the flow of water it is designed to manage comes not from higher altitudes out to sea but rather from the sea to its inland polders, tributaries, and lakes. Nearly half of the Netherlands is below sea-level, or a NAP (NORMAAL AMSTERDAMSCH PEIL) of 0 (double check this measure). Thought of this way, the Port acts as a basin, drawing both the sea and what it bears inland. The sea wants to flow inland, reclaiming what once belonged to it. Capital's drives for increased circulation of goods, materials, and fuels through the Port of Amsterdam and inland further to the trunk hubs up the Rhine means expansion of storage and inflow capacity; but capacity in this unique interface of fresh and salt water plunges the logistical pledge for value-added into the brackish estuarine ecology marking the sea's promise of salt. 

At the base of the expanded sea locks at Ijmuiden is a problem for capital: the cost of circulation is hydrochemical; elemental; thermodynamic; and estuarine. 
 
II: BRACKISH METHODS 

During an intensive week of collaborative, critical, and creative research in July, we joined two dozen researchers in the brackish fields of the IJ's estuarine ecotone. We were keen to interrogate both the the veritable invisibility of the infrastructural expansion underway at IJmuiden and its relation to the marine research taking place nearby on Texel Island, but also to trouble what occured to us as the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries preventing interrogation of the collision of political economy and ecology in the hydrological and logistical densities of this specific site. Their material co-constitution takes little metaphor to comprehend, and yet the concrete abstractions of capital and the elemental dynamics of the estuary cannot be reduced to a singular vocabulary or mode of inquiry. We decided as a group to hold these distinctions in tension and to invite the field itself to offer up coordinates for a form of relation premised on these interactive but irreducible vibrations between the matter at hand and what it abstracts. 

After two days at the NIOZ sea research centre on Texel, testing seaweed under brackish conditions and taking core samples of sulphuric sediment, we found ourselves back at IJmuiden. On a vessel bound for the port through the sea locks, we were struck by the silent and almost imperceptible break between saline and estuarine waters. Casting hydrophones into the locks revealed the cut imposed by this expanse of steel and earth. Not only does subsea recording render audible the shifts in salinity imposed by the system of locks and sea defences, as the saline density of water affects the circulation of sound beneath the surface, but it also makes legible the sheer volumetric scale of the hydrological discplacement necessary to maintain the disruption of brackish transition waters. In order to manage water levels and keep the flow of saltwater at bay, 10,000 metric tons [check ref in notes] of estuarine water are pumped from the IJ estuary back into the North Sea every second. Evidently, opening the Zeesluis IJmuiden to allow the passage of liquid and dry bulk into the Port lays an impossible burden on the pumping systems of the sea lock. Instead, as the captain announces over the ship's tannoy system, the circulation of capital through the Zeesluis is dependent on the engineering of Selectieve Onttrekking. Translated as both selective abstraction and extraction, the term refers to the desalinisation of water between the sea locks; the transformation and reduction of the brackish zone and the halocline gradient to a sharp boundary between coastal waters and inland logistics networks. 

III: SELECTIVE ABSTRACTION 

For Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, the meeting of land and sea is an 'ur-ecotone' at which the estuary, the coast, or the littoral functions as both a boundary and ‘a transition zone, a contact zone, a space of flows.’ If, as Spahr and Clover suggest, capital operationalises the manifold differentials that manifest across ecotones and ecoclines for the production of surplus value, then the intersection of shipping infrastructure with the brackish waters of the IJ renders acutely visible the exploitation of this terraqueous boundary as ‘the meeting point of two ecologies across which value flows’ and becomes available for capture. Along the IJ, the ecotonal differentials of the brackish zone appear within the circuits of maritime capitalism in multiple modalities: as an externality to value, an impediment to logistical accumulation, and an emergent resource in the form of 'blue energy.' 

Along the Afsluitdijk -- a 32-kilometre-long sea wall visible from Texel Island -- the infrastructural division of the IJsselmeer from the Wadden Sea operates as a test site for saline gradient power. While the dam encloses the body of water once known as the Zuidersee, now desalinated and transformed into the freshwater IJsselmeer, salinity gradient power now promises to valorize the sharp saline differential between this artificial body of water and the open sea. Generating energy from the movement of ions from saltwater to freshwater across a membrane, salinity gradient difference harnesses the electric potential of osmotic pressure from differentials in salt concentration. First developed in the 1970s in lockstep with the state of Israel's settler-colonial control of water supply between the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, saline gradient power offers a striking concretisation of the ecotonal logic of value production. In the same instant that the engineers of De Nieuwe Afsluitdijk attempt to operationalise and valorise 'the natural property of eliminating concentration differences' through the mixing of fresh and saltwater, the resulting 'brakwater' appears as a problematic waste product in the process of energy production. Discharged into the surrounding waters, the brackish effluent of the osmotic energy plant incrementally reduces the saline difference between the two sides of the Afsluitdijk's boundary and produces a feedback loop of ever-decreasing gradients, reduced potential energy, and falling rates of profit. 

This externality of osmotic value appears, like the saltwater outflow of the Noordzeesluis, as a reminder of the true ecological cost of circulation. Where the sea lock and the dam attempt to manage, block, or exploit hydrological flows across the coastal ecotone, brackishness appears as as a persistent problematic for the selective abstraction of estuarine ecology.  
 
IV: COSTS OF CIRCULATION 

Militant struggle against the aquatic abstractions of capital across its long and violent durée give us good reason to plunge into the hydrologies of logistical space today. To plunge, wade, and align with the plenum of frictions rusting up along the banks of its value added services. Not just because the ecological injustices leaking out from its barges and sea-locks are scenes of slow and horrifying violence, but because anti-capitalist worlds given figurative force in these brackish waters offers a map of solidarity easy to miss when staged from land.
 
Logistical spaces like the one connecting the Port of Amsterdam to the sea-locks at Ijmuiden are typically understood as scenes of circulation. Raw materials and finished commodities alike move through waters, barges, docks, and standards in a tightly choreographed set of interlocking technologies and drives in order to bridge the infinitely expanding gap between site of production and market consumption. As a site of political leverage, then, circulatory infrastructure has often registered as complimentary to terrains of struggle over value produced in production. But neither Marx nor Marxists made such a crude distinction. States of mattering for capital are in media res amidst the circuits of capital on the move; in the thick of abstraction and concretion in a lexicon that Marx in Capital Volume II borrowed directly from the emergent theory of energy:
 
 
Rarely will Marx eventuate in such a literal materialism. No less literal here in this strange passage for its excessive figurations of a molecular real realized by the splitting and bonding of carbon molecules. What is at stake is the expenditures and absorption of matter in media res, between capital circulation and the abstract determinations of value, on the one hand, and the energic materiality of a thing compelled manually into movement. The costs of circulation are energic and molecular; they are also value-determined and value-exposed.
 
And since the lion's share of logistical armatures bridge or wade in the planet's waterways, the question of circulation and its political costs is also a question inflected by the material specificity of hydrological composition. The question we found ourselves returning to was the extent to which the elemental signature of logistical infrastructures--plunged and dug into ecological milieu as they invariably though often invisibly are--insinuates a grounded terrain of inquiry and struggle, or if indeed the effort to hold political ecology and economy in tension involved a category error. Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas's Capitalism and the Sea, for instance, underscores the port as a critical site of transition between offshore and onshore logistics networks, ‘transferring commodities and generating value across different maritime-dependent sectors of the world economy’. At IJmuiden, the unfettered circulation of value is underwritten by the blockage of estuarine circulation and the erasure of multiple ecoclines that otherwise emerge in brackish waters. While the mixing of petroleum products at terminals along the North Sea Canal appears as 'value-added' in the supply of crude oil and gas, the circulation of maritime capital and transhipment of bulk resources through the Zeesluis is structurally reliant on the disruption of this hydrologic exchange. Value-added services incur into the inertia of the commodity as it picks up steam (and external costs) in the aquatic arteries of capital. 
 
As the intersection of 'techniques, discourses, instruments, strategies, and technologies aimed at optimizing circulation,' Charmaine Chua et al. trace how the logic of logistical supply and its desire to eradicate turbulence within global trade 'contributes to the material conditions through which the security and well-being of human and nonhuman lives are rendered subordinate to the imperative of smooth, efficient circulation.’ (622). What happens when the smooth, efficient circulation of the commodity hit a brackish impediment? When hydrology floods the calculus of capital with the elemental excess of salt? As Campling and Colas remind us, even while capital has radically reshaped the ocean -- ‘its living and inanimate resources appropriated, extracted and processed in the realisation of exchange-value’ -- this maritime factor retains a formative influence on its development. In the brackish waters of the enlivened ecotones lining tidal waters and logistical arteries inland all over the planet’s terminals, this formative influence is increasingly rusting up and weighted down by saline grades and the thermohaline circulation.
 
 
'Of course the dimensions assumed by the conversion of commodities in the hands of the capitalists cannot transform this labour — which does not create any value — into labour productive of value. [...] he [the merchant] should be regarded as a machine which reduces useless expenditure of energy or helps to set production time free.'


https://theafsluitdijk.com/projects/blue-energy/when/

Blue Energy is based on the natural property of eliminating concentration differences. Just like a combination of warm and cold air lead to a moderate temperature, a mix of fresh and saltwater leads to slightly saltwater, or brackish water.

https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/osmotic-power-plans-scrutinised#

'One of the major issues with blue energy is brackish water. The power plant’s effluent is a brackish solution that should be discharged away from the power plant in such a way that it doesn’t contaminate the supplies of fresh water and salt water, since this would decrease the salinity difference between the two types of water and thus decrease the energy output. This problem increases exponentially with the size of the power plant.'