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Paper short abstract

Not all oil is oil. Or rather, not all hydrocarbons are fluid when found in natural state underground. This material fact is of great importance to oil producing actors - but equally so for social scientists interested in unfolding the role energy producers play for democracy, state and politics.

Paper long abstract

The hydrocarbon bitumen in the Canadian oil sands differs greatly from North Sea oil, when it comes to physical properties and the natural state it is found in. This was never openly addressed by the Norwegian oil producer Equinor when arguing for entering the controversial site. They rather highlighted how expertise from producing oil on the Norwegian Continental Shelf made them fit to meet the challenges of the oil sands. This turned out not to be the case. Through my following of their doing, I came to learn that the hydrocarbon’s materiality pushed back, resisting to be converted to ‘real’ oil in any easy way - at least not in the ways the company anticipated. Not only did this make the oil sands project into an environmentally and economically difficult endeavor for the company; all the troubling also incited high temperatures in the public debates in Norway. Ethnographic work on this demanding project underpins how geologies of oil need to be made part of the picture: My research displays how the site itself, the place of origin and the natural state of the hydrocarbon matter – in the end also for societal acceptance of the resource in question. Attending to powerful actors’ concrete resource-making practices, how they perform their everyday extraction and conversion, is vital. This can represent a way for social scientists to play up counter-narratives of ‘it could have been otherwise’, by attending to the resistance more-than-human actors act out when sought transformed to oil ready for markets.