Offshore: Energy Cultures of the North Sea

• Applicant: Dr. Katie Ritson
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2021 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455390570

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

The aim of OFFSHORE was to produce a systematic study of North Sea petroculture, focusing on the two major extracting nations, Norway and the UK. Working on the assumption that the growing awareness of the climate crisis was driving a renewed interest in the “culture” produced by oil and gas extraction, the project brought together recent novels, poems, films, and exhibitions to analyse and compare the way that the North Sea oil was being explored and represented in Norway and the UK. The project started in 2021, halfway through the Covid-19 pandemic and less than a year before the invasion of Ukraine. Both of these events were transformative in the way that energy systems and their vulnerabilities were made visible in Northern Europe, and they served to underline the relevance of the topic. During the lifetime of the project, there were no fewer than six major temporary exhibitions on oil/energy history (in Aberdeen, Wolfsburg, Stavanger, Oslo and Vienna) and several number of new novels, films and artworks from Norway and the UK. The monograph that results from this project focuses on cultural production between 2006 and 2023, in the period of heightened and multiple energy “crises” that are casting fossil fuel extractivism in an ever-harsher light. Research in the project draws on new theoretical insights from the energy humanities to analyse a selection of these very recent engagements with the “oil boom” in the North Sea in the 1970s and 1980s. This historical period—often referred to as the “oljeeventyr” or oil fairytale in Norwegian—was when the offshore extraction of North Sea oil reserves became economically viable and began to generate onshore wealth. Contemporaneous accounts are sparse and focus largely on technical details; the more recent portrayals that are the subject of this study are more critical of the fairy-tale and in particular, complicate its narrative cornerstones of beginning, plot, and resolution with the long lifecycle of oil. The analysis in this project finds that literary and cultural production is inseparable from the abundance of cheap oil and gas that fuels it, and that there is currently a deeply felt need to understand and reflect on this. Writers and artists are searching for (and finding) new ways of telling stories of the oil boom that are distinct from narrative logic of the age of petroleum.

Publications

• Sweat, Light, and Oil: Seeing the Energy in Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy Novels. Edda, 109(2), 126-139.
  Ritson, Katie
  
• Review Essay. Energy in Crisis: New Perspectives on Petrocultures. Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 14(1), 203-209.
  Ritson, Katie
  
• Sentimentality, Sacrifice, and Oil: Reckoning with Offshore Extractive Trauma. To the Last Drop - Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality, 163-184. transcript Verlag.
  Ritson, Katie
  
• Doggerland Rising: Oil, Literature, and Resilience. Environmental Humanities, 41-59. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
  Ritson, Katie