Oil Finders: The Planet as a Hydrocarbon Reservoir

• In Event: Frameworks for Speculation: Science, Economy, and the Uncertain Environment

Abstract

This paper reexamines the history of imperial overseas oil prospecting as practiced by American and British geologists and petrologists since 1800. It focuses on the transformation of “oil finding” into the abstract science of geophysical prospecting in the early twentieth century and the forms of planetary knowledge this science produced amidst the global turn towards increasing hydrocarbon production and economic integration. The paper follows the emergence of a visual medium for petroleum surveys prior to seismographic technologies, and locates their development as an appropriative technology often based on colonized peoples’ prehistories of petroleum use. The visual, and technologically-mediated reconfiguration of oil prospecting work inaugurated by seismographic, gravity torsion, and later geophysical surveying, fundamentally remade global understandings of the earth as a potential reservoir for practically unlimited hydrocarbon development. This abstract recoding of the earth unfolded in a shifting geopolitical context as formal empires were replaced by nation-states, shaping a scientific and universalizing vision of the planetary that often stood in ambivalent relation to the novel sovereign geographies of decolonization. This paper explores how geophysicists themselves understood this relationship, as well as their own history in producing an account of the earth rendered into visual expressions of technology and capitalist value.

Author

• Matthew B. Shutzer, Duke University