GEOLOGY, POTENTIALITY, SPECULATION: On the Indeterminacy of First Oil
By Gisa Weszkalnys. 2015
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article uses what the petroleum industry calls “first oil” to examine the uneven process of resource making on the margins of global zones of extraction. It explores how the double obscurity of hydrocarbon prospects—both geologically obscured and their worth not yet revealed by the market—generates particular material constraints, pauses, and setbacks characteristic of petroleum production. The article draws on ethnographic and archival material from Sao Tome and Principe (STP) where repeated attempts to explore offshore oil have yet to transform geological potential into an economic asset. It highlights the incongruous effects of certain epistemic practices and devices (contract, zone, and well) aimed at facilitating first oil by managing uncertainty. As a result, they work as gestures of an indeterminate matter whose existence has continued to be doubted.
Subfields: Anthropology, Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb3ce0aa797c910428b4e4c63d0fb4da0aa97869
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Citations in the corpus
- Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination (2020, background): “Importantly too, the substances that are speculated on within timescapes matter (Weszkalnys, 2015).”