“Always exploring. Never satisfied.” This Statoil tagline encapsulates the drive behind Norway’s largest energy corporation that has
been functioning on the Norwegian Continental Shelf since 1972. The first well was
spudded in the summer of 1966, and Phillips announced the Norwegians’ fabled best
Christmas present ever when oil was found at the Ekofisk field in December 1969. The
story of Norway’s petroleum era, appropriately labeled as oljeeventyret [the oil fairytale] in the vernacular, reads like an adventure novel of the twentieth
century. An embedded
tale in that larger narrative, the history of Statoil itself in the forty plus years
since it originated is also a gripping account of exploration and endeavors.
This article extracts one particular Statoil story told about a groundbreaking installation
north of the sixty-second parallel: Snøhvit [Snow White]. This name graces the first exclusively subsea offshore development in the Barents
Sea operated by Statoil. Marketing this cutting-edge technology and northernmost processing
plant for the extracted natural gas brought another set of firsts, and the evolution
of their subsea technology narrative to the public is the trajectory in focus here.
This study is not based on a thorough review of all corporate marketing from Statoil,
but rather it analyzes select cornerstone pieces made available to the general public
via Statoil’s extensive website: Resources in the North, Melkøya: Soundslide, Snøhvit LNG Project, Longer, Deeper, Colder, and Treasure Hunter. This article investigates how a global energy company headquartered on the borders
of the High North tells its Arctic story and which tropes Statoil employs to shape
constituents’ impressions of their work.
This discourse enters the entangled space between ecology and modernity that Stephanie
Le Menager calls “feeling ecological,” which in her words is “a competition between
emotional investments in modernity as we know it, through its
fossil fuel infrastructure, and in ecology, as the network of human-nonhuman relations
that we theorize as a given habitat” (Le Menager 2011, 27). Navigating this zone is
the task of Statoil oil marketing and communications, in
order to handle emotionally charged connections between nature, science, and technology
for a general public that encompasses local and international stakeholders.
It is possible to track how Statoil has continually tailored its story about the Snøhvit
installation to counter environmental criticisms and public skepticism about exploration
in the Barents Sea by sculpting a counter narrative of corporate adventure, skill,
and precision. By honing its verbal and visual literacy, Statoil has inverted the
tone of its initial audiovisual narrative to re-write this Arctic fairytale of Snøhvit.
What began as a cautionary plea to protect a fragile space from unknown threats has
matured into a self-confident assurance that Statoil’s acclimatized experts understand
the conquered zone and are equipped to go farther. The corporate marketing materials
propose that taming the Arctic frontier in this Oil Age is a heroic tale where elite
skill, sensitivity to surroundings, and nimble adaptation justifies Statoil’s presence
and activity in the region.
The history of this northern sector belies the current confidence, for its development
had a tumultuous start. Norwegian lawmakers amended the border law in 1980, and the
first drilling in the Barents Sea uncovered the gas fields of Askeladd [Ash Lad] and
Albatross in 1981 and Snøhvit in 1984. Opinions at the time were likely split, for no one knew then which namesake the Arctic
adventure would follow. Would it end well, like the respective fairytales of the Ash
Lad and Snow White, where the naïvely intelligent, good-hearted Norwegian protagonists
would against all odds succeed and win the prince or princess and half the kingdom,
or would this story resemble a meeting with the ill-fated bird famed to be a sailor’s
bad luck symbol that would curse the unlucky industry for moving to the High North? While we await the ultimate verdict as the master narrative continues to be spun,
some might claim it had been cursed by the latter or perhaps thwarted by an evil step-parent,
for high risks and poor feasibility studies shelved all development projects in the
Barents Sea until the late 1990s. During this time, Statoil developed prototype subsea
well technology at the Gullfaks field that began production in December 1986. Eventually
the Norwegian parliament approved a revised plan for Snøhvit in March 2002 and construction
began in June of that year. The tables had turned and the fairytale was resumed.
The temptation to contrast the folktale Snow White to its namesake in the Norwegian oil fairytale is too great. The symbol of youth
and beauty, this ideal woman was first a desired child later shunned by her parents.
She survives a treacherous journey into the wilderness and lives thereafter in secluded
isolation. Her only friends in exile are dwarves, the hardworking, clever men who
leave home every day to extract precious metals from deep mines. Her mere existence
provokes either deep love or hate in those she meets, and she eventually overcomes
all the deceptive ploys to kill her and resumes her birthright as a queen. While scholars
of Snow White have argued for its literary power as narrative, figure, and myth, another angle
of interpretation may be to consider the Snøhvit of Norwegian petroculture as an allegory.
Assigning equivalents to the characters, plot, setting, objects, and patterns of Statoil’s
Arctic story may be a productive line of argumentation and an alternate lens with
which to view Le Menager’s notion of “feeling ecological” in the High North.
Revolutionary technology has engineered Snøhvit, a highly desired offspring of the
offshore energy development, to become an innovation of near mythic proportions in
the Barents Sea. The underwater installations counter the challenges of Arctic waters
and harsh climate, accommodate the fishing industry, and preserve the vulnerable ecological
systems. Gas from surrounding fields is extracted via subsea wells at a depth of 250-300
meters and transported 143 kilometers to shore. Coming onshore at Melkøya, an island just outside of Hammerfest, the gas is processed
and cooled to a chilly -160°C to reach its liquid state (called LNG henceforth) in
preparation for global transport via specially manufactured tanker ships. The entire
system functions on an astounding scale with no visual surface trace of the offshore
activity, yet its mere existence angers some powerful people. Its presence is revealed
not by a speaking mirror, but by moving pictures that confirm and narrate Snøhvit’s
existence via visual representation.
For nearly forty years the Statoil marketing team has built its offshore visual reputation
on another masterpiece of modern engineering and technology–the oil platform of the
North Sea. The resilient and enormous platforms cut a striking image from positions
on land, sea, and air, and scores of images are situated to show the platforms’ enormous
girth as if size alone empowers them with the stubborn tenacity to withstand the extraction
of hydrocarbons from below the seabed. The challenge for subsea installations such
as Snøhvit that have no such monumental visual marker at sea, forces marketing representations
to be animations or imaginative visual descriptions of the underwater technology. Without this visual shorthand of the platform as a symbol of innovation, new imagery
must be employed to convey the equally powerful impact and energy expertise in the
High North in a new pictorial discourse. A selection of Statoil’s corporate videos
offers an arc highlighting developments in that representational narrative.
The first film, a two-minute video entitled Resources in the North embedded in the Statoil’s Going North campaign webpages, is rhetorically ineffective
because it pairs mutually exclusive groupings of words and images. Conflicting messages in verbal and visual modalities negate each other regarding
the environment, the mission, and the outcome. While the verbal message conveys a
positive, persuasive tone, the resounding visual message is less that of a homegrown
vigilant explorer promising to care for his backyard and more that of an intrusive
transnational corporation resolved to disturb the natural balance of the Barents Sea.
Produced for the 2007 Statoil Sustainability report the year Snøhvit came online,
the film juxtaposes the fragile Arctic ecosystem visually coded and identified as
endangered animals, pristine waters, and melting ice formations to the aurally described
potential of the energy reserves locked below the seabed. The film opens with a satellite
view of the rotating earth, the glowing blue marble, and the camera zooms down to
the frontier of the Barents Sea. A mystical space exploration soundtrack cultivates
the sense of awaiting unknown discoveries locked in the subsea floor of the unexplored
region. Images of pack ice and open sea, underwater glowing jellyfish, fish in a feeding
frenzy, and a breaching white whale are closely followed by ambling polar bears and
calving glaciers. These symbolic images, which resonate as some of the archetypal
Arctic icons frequently employed to advance Polar environmental justice issues, reinforce
an understanding of nature as wild, uncivilized, and pristine as is common in traditional
landscape photography. Their powerful visual display outweighs the impact of the spoken
word, which undermines Statoil’s promised integrity of purpose.
The deep-voiced male voice over insists in his spoken narration that energy and environmental
concerns are not mutually exclusive in the Arctic, but that this vulnerable natural
habitat–“one of Europe’s last big intact ecosystems … the food bowl for future generations”–is a treasured piece in an intricate puzzle
that Statoil is both well-prepared and
best situated to solve. Citing a nearly forty-year track record of responsible oil
and gas exploration and extraction in the North Sea, the narrator underscores that
“the Norwegian petroleum industry has become a laboratory for environmentally friendly
technology” in recent history. Downplaying the fact that existing oil and gas reserves
are on
the decline, thus requiring exploration in previously untapped fields such as the
Barents Sea, the narration attempts to establish the necessity of the quest by relying
on value-laden environmental imagery to persuade viewers. As the sun sets on the panorama
of the traditional oil platform at sea after a storm, viewers are led to believe that
Statoil is entitled to drill in this new region because of its unique offshore history
and technological expertise.
This sense of entitlement resonates with a study conducted by political scientist
Leif Christian Jensen, who has analyzed public discourse in Norwegian print media
over a six-year period and tracked the growth of what he calls the “Drilling for the
Environment” debate–an argument for an evolving High North policy in the early 2000s
that persuaded
Norwegians of the benefits of opening up the Barents Sea for oil and gas recovery
before the Russians (Jensen 35). In his study Jensen identified discourse co-optation
at work, meaning one side inverted
the other’s argument to gain rhetorical advantage. “Discourse co-optation describes
how one discourse burrows into the heart of a counter-discourse,
turns its logic upside down and puts it to work to re-establish hegemony and re-gain
political support. One discourse is strengthened by the addition of a new, powerful
argument; the other is weakened almost to the same degree” (Jensen 36-7). As northern
foreign policy concerns became increasingly oriented toward the environment,
Norway strategically positioned itself as the most advanced and environmentally conscious
player in the High North. The evolving message, which Jensen chronicles in four Norwegian
newspapers, persuades Norwegians of the notion that exploiting energy in the Arctic
would be a boon for the environment, foreign policy, and the economy. “By going ahead
in the Barents Sea, Norway is giving the Russians a helping hand, benefitting
the environment and earning good money to boot” (Jensen 35).
Statoil does not directly enter into Jensen’s analysis of the security questions of
national energy policy or discursive co-optation, for he chooses not to focus on or
identify individual stakeholders; however, I detect the same discursive overtones
audible in some of the early corporate Going North marketing materials produced by
Statoil. Returning again to an example in the film, the narrator echoes the optimistic
mantra that energy recovery in the Barents Sea will “boost both industrial activity
and value creation” in the local environment of the far north. But rather than underscore
that message
with representative place-based images of extraction points in Northern Norway, the
visual message that accompanies this voice recording shows the dotted lines that trace
the export path of eventual recovered resources from the Norwegian seabed of the Barents
Sea to central Europe and to the East Coast of the United States, New York in particular.
Read this way, Statoil’s self-representation in this video becomes that of a greedy
emissary devoid of agency who serves only external capitalist forces outside of Norway.
The primary motor is not to preserve the immediate region of impact, the communities
nearest the unnamed LNG plant at Melkøya where Snøhvit gas is piped onshore and processed,
but the international consumers who thirst for refined oil and gas. Statoil here appears
unintentionally to be playing into the hands of environmentalists opposed to drilling
in the High North, playing Jensen’s notion of discourse co-optation in inadvertent
reverse, by serving up the most threatened elements of the region to the greediest
global buyers at the highest price.
Statoil’s next strategy for marketing Snøhvit and Melkøya and underscoring the perseverance
of its growing presence in the High North was to distance itself from the emotional
images of environmental protest in the short film Going North and instead situate energy infrastructure as the given. Images of vulnerable animals
and fragile landscapes were jettisoned in favour of the stark precision of the sleek
fusion of nature and technology in petroculture.
Michael Truscello uses the term “petroculture” when analyzing Canadian photographer
Edward Burtynsky’s collection entitled “Oil: Extraction & Refinement” in light of
the political inheritance from the photography movement known as The
New Topographics. Truscello reads recent landscape photography that rejects conventional standards
of the genre and now sees “traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come” in
Burtynsky’s work, where images of petroleum extraction and transport meld wilderness
and civilization in a new understanding of society that captures the tensions of the
twenty-first century (Truscello 188). Burtynsky presents his aesthetics as “nature
transformed through industry” in his own expression of Le Menager’s notion of feeling
ecological. For Truscello,
Burtynsky “complicates the observer’s relationship to agency in the Age of Oil by
foregrounding
the scale, technological complexity, and almost mythical ubiquity of petroculture.
Absent is the bilateralism of earnest environmental portraiture, the simplistic agential
dualism that pits ‘people’ against Big Oil” (190).
While Burtynsky’s photographs evoke discomfort, they capture a beauty that is difficult
to articulate. This positive spin on the splendor of science permeates Statoil’s second
Snøhvit marketing image. The ninety-second film, a photography montage entitled Melkøya: Soundslide attributed to Gjertrud Lindberg, is a visual slideshow with no spoken text. The dualism
of the multimodal effort in Resources in the North is eliminated for this montage, which is instead set to a soundtrack of electronica
house music that could have been composed by Norwegian band Röyksopp. The hip sounds
fuse stark images of outstanding gray tone contrasts with bursts of vibrant colour.
Off-shore orange, subsea yellow, radio tower red, and brilliant blue splash colour
amid the blinding snow whiteouts, charcoal seas, asphalt skies, cold concrete tanks,
steely aluminum pipes, and slate ship hulls responsible for transforming the hydrocarbons
from Snøhvit into a landscape of international power. The orange backs of the Statoil
employees suggest that these faceless innovators are responsible for preserving the
bright colours that co-exist with the pristine environment. Clearly foreign, these
colourful markers appear not to have scarred the virgin landscape but to have created
an equally odd and resilient cultural setting built to weather and complement the
harsh climate of the north. The fusion of Statoil’s vision and the riches of the north
has become a new petroculture in its own right.
The absolute focus in this clip on the local environment with no external impact (apart
from the waiting ship as transport vessel docked at port) downplays the risk for the
local viewers by concentrating solely on the seamless functionality of the LNG plant
site. Production is underway and the new shine has not yet worn off, but the project
remains swathed in an aura of mystique. Neither apocalyptic nor pastoral, these images
convey a cutting-edge synthesis. With no verbal text to accompany the visual feast
of the image itself, viewers are left to deduce their own interpretations. As Burtynsky
articulates in the vision for his photography, his desire is for the images to speak
“as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between
attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear.” Lindberg’s Melkøya: Soundslide montage balances on this same edge, retaining the inhospitable landscape yet evoking
the savvy control of technology.
My reading of the local environment in this vein is inspired in part by Ursula Heise,
who argues for a revision of environmentalism that reassesses the global scale of
human impact on local natural and cultural landscapes. Heise advocates in her 2008
book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet that a challenge to “environmentalist conceptions of place” is to “imagine local
environments […] as habitats that are ceaselessly being reshaped by the encroachments of the global
as well as by their own inherent dynamism” (114). While this is hardly a call for
a pro-industry stance, this film conveys the tone
of local partnership and acclimatization that Statoil needed to strike. In a move
perhaps reminiscent of Jensen’s discourse co-optation, I suggest that Statoil’s message
in this visual slideshow seems to have struck a balance between environmental protection,
economic development, and resource exploitation in order to create a visual narrative
that demands a reconsideration of its corporate agency in the Arctic.
A third film in this same vein further constructs Statoil’s image as a good neighbour
in the Barents Sea. This animated video titled simply Snøhvit LNG Project oversimplifies the process from extraction to export in relation to the fishing industry.
As in the Resources in the North opening, the screen opens to a map of Europe and the camera zooms in to Norway and
the Barents Sea, identifying from a bird’s-eye view the location of the Snøhvit field
and underwater link to Melkøya just outside of Hammerfest. Diffuse ocean noises give
way to seagull cries as the birds in question circle an incoming trawler. The animated
camera dives below the surface and sinks down past the trawler’s lines to the subsea
yellow installations anchored on the ocean floor. A school of fish swims past, chased
by the trawler’s nets, both predator and prey unimpeded in their journey by the subsea
well. New sound tones begin as a 3-D cross-section of the sea floor falls away to
indicate graphically how some wells extract gas while others inject CO₂ deep into
the Earth. Colour-coded as blood vessels where oil replaces oxygen, the camera leaves
the blue energy-poor CO₂ pipes and follows the red energy-rich gas stream to Melkøya
where an oversimplified floor plan of the island traces the transformation of raw
gas to LNG. The awaiting tanker departs with its cargo and meets on its outbound journey
the trawlers coming home from fishing at sea. After passing as friendly neighbours,
the tanker morphs into a red dash on the initial European map, leaving Hammerfest
heading south and west in order to indicate the scope of delivery.
This animation downplays the harsh regional conditions by insisting that the Norwegian
energy industry can withstand and adapt to this climate as well as the fishing industry
has done–all while recognizing the importance of the fishing lifestyle and the industries’
ability to coexist. Indeed it resonates with the partnerships Statoil always has enjoyed
with the fishers south of the sixty-second parallel. This reinforces the message that
communications scholars Øyvind Ihlen and Michael Nitz identify in their analysis of
how the rhetorical framing of the Snøhvit media debate in terms of coexistence presented
the argument that “petroleum activity posed no threat to the fishing industry or the
environment” (7). Apart from the maps framing the animation, there is little to no
evidence of the
Arctic setting in this film. This is offshore business as usual, or at least a projection
of the new norm that Statoil is striving to establish in the subsea adventure narrative.
The goal is to build a subsea factory on the seabed; the corporate vision, according
to Statoil Senior Vice President for Technology Excellence Siri Espedal Kindem, is
to go longer, deeper, and colder to acquire global energy resources.
The film also signifies an acceptance and recognition of the overall state of petromodernity
where animated short films join other “aesthetic images and environmental emotions
that valorize … the process of oil extraction” (Le Menager 2012, 62). Le Menager’s research on the
aesthetics of petromodernity investigates art within
“a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum”
(Le Menager 2012, 60). Although this study focuses more on the content of the individual
films than the
process of their creation, it is telling to trace the evolution of environmental emotions
of these Statoil short films. To reiterate the core of this artistic investigation,
in Truscello’s words, “By expanding our understanding of distributed human and non-human
agencies in ‘petromodernity,’
we can better recognize the shifting intensities of petrocultural assemblages” (193).
If these Statoil films collectively can be granted status as an assemblage, then
parsing the tensions embedded in the multimodal chronicle of this new subsea extraction
narrative affords better understanding of Statoil’s official Snøhvit story to a critical
public.
It remains to be seen, perhaps, how Snøhvit will actually align to the fairytale Snow White. Critics may already perceive the tale as an ecocritical allegory, intended to illuminate
the hazards of twenty-first-century petroculture. Statoil arguably has framed this
multimodal narrative with the intent and hope that it will deliver the anticipated
fairytale ending. The figure of Snow White is the ideal of perfection and beauty,
the fairest of them all; in the offshore petroleum industry, the new ideal outgrowth
of Snøhvit is described as equally superlative–the underwater factory with seafloor
installations that function without surface displacement in increasingly inaccessible
locations. Subsea technology is a fusion of meeting environmental concerns and boosting
production that mediates conflict between dueling perspectives on energy and ecology.
Statoil’s marketing story of Snøhvit models energy exploration in the Barents Sea
and chronicles changes in the energy worldview in petromodernity.
A parting example of the latent power of this new Arctic fairytale returns full circle
to Statoil’s role in shaping the narrative of Norway’s oljeeventyr. A one-minute Statoil television commercial depicts a bedtime story where a daughter
inquires about her daddy’s job. This innocent, realistic scene transforms into a fantastic
animated bedtime adventure where the pair travels as “treasure hunters” to answer
the girl’s questions and search for the underwater riches that “the world needs in
order to function.” Because there is much less treasure now than there used to be, the inquisitive girl’s
daddy tells her, the journey to the treasure is more difficult and dangerous. And
once it is found, they still need to figure out how to retrieve it. When the daughter
questions if success is even possible, the daddy answers that it almost defies the possible. Marketing innovation to a new generation coming of age in this
era of petromodernity still relies heavily on the fairytale and adventure narrative,
luring impressionable viewers at an early age into the fantastic mysteries of the
deep. The commercial’s closing printed tagline at the bottom of the screen reads:
“The Norwegian oil adventure has never been more exciting.” Statoil, the powerful
narrator, enchants an ageless audience with daring tales of
adaptable, clever heroes on the technological frontier who are navigating new landscapes,
ever-curious, and “always exploring–never satisfied.”