Futures: Oil and the Making of Modularity in Equatorial Guinea

• Main Author: Appel, Hannah
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2011
• Subjects: African Studies; Cultural anthropology
• ISBN: 9798672176260

Despite radical differences between supply sites around the world, and ever-increasing technological and political challenges, hydrocarbon is reliably transformed from sub-sea and subsoil deposit into the world's most profitable commodity. How? Despite profound political, environmental, economic, and social entanglements in each and every supply site, the transnational oil industry consistently escapes consequential responsibility for local outcomes. How? This project traces the labor-intensive processes through which Equatorial Guinea's hydrocarbon resources are converted from sub-sea deposit into global futures price. I focus on the work these processes require, of labor, material infrastructures and technologies, as well as of the legal, promotional, and ethical framing processes required to lubricate the passage of oil to market.Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I explore the idea that the offshore oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea is a modular capitalist project: a bundled and repeating set of technological, social, political, and economic practices aimed at profit-making that materialize in diverse ways wherever the industry finds commercially viable hydrocarbon deposits. I argue that the considerable work put into the making of modularity intends to disentangle the production of profit from the place in which the industry happens to find itself, to structure liability and responsibility in such a way that the industry can remove itself from the social, legal, political, and environmental entanglements in supply sites. This argument finds empirical traction through chapters on offshore infrastructures and labor regimes; Equatorial Guinea's "new" national economy in the wake of oil; Production Sharing Contracts and subcontracting arrangements; and the industry's corporate and residential enclaves.Modularity is a work-intensive, asymptotic process in which messy engagement with difference is the assumed starting point; the hoped-for framing requires massive logistical, financial, and infrastructural investment; and the intended disentanglement is compromised at its core, as the oil industry can only animate the repeating techniques and technologies widely accepted as standardized by seeping into every crevice of Equatorial Guinea's daily life.