Paper short abstract:

Ultra-deep drill rigs are instrumental to opening the western Gulf of Guinea to oil exploration and production. The paper examines how risk is managed and reproduced through the operational logics of these technologies through an anthropological investigation of Ghana’s off-shore oil industry.

Paper long abstract:

Pursuing an anthropology of infrastructure, this paper addresses the emergence of the western Gulf of Guinea as an oil frontier of impending global significance. Focused on rig-engineering, workers and labor routines, and prospecting contracts within Ghana's off-shore oil sector, at the center of inquiry are the techno-logics of the deepwater drill rigs penetrating tens of thousands of feet of water and sub-sea depths. Findings suggest that the contracts subtending rig operations establish a chain of command mimicking the complex mechanics of the rig itself. The "techno-economic networks" (Law 1991) behind these agreements ensure the flexibility of rig movements, crew composition, and production targets. Double-edged, the decentralized terms of operator and service contracts are also a means of corporate risk avoidance, reducing accountability to actuarial liability and normalizing the insecurities of hydrocarbon exploration and extraction. Ethnographic investigations further reveal risk and risk-management to be the leading "infralogics" of rig operations, establishing the technical and discursive principles around which rig work revolves. Underwriting a pre-formatted yet adjustable operational platform that is amenable to circulation and inscribed in infrastructure, risk provides a common culture for rig workers, mediating the social and technological challenges of arduous, repetitive and crisis-prone work routines. Despite the agential potentials of risk-management rubrics endowing workers at all levels with decision-making responsibility, by treating human inputs as just another piece of rig technology, the engineering of agency around risk down-plays the inherent non-human risks of deepwater extraction, ultimately fostering risk-taking and the replication and circulation of ultra-deep technologies.