Searching for “The New Oil”: Preemptive Hope and Post-Petroleum Futures in Norway's Oil Capital

This article explores the role of imaginaries of preemptive hope in second-tier cities and regions within the global petroleumscape that face an uncertain future in a post-petroleum world order. It highlights the importance of such imaginaries in discussions of stability, destabilisation, and ruptures in the petroleum landscape. The article examines the assumptions and presuppositions that undergird the post-petroleum imaginaries in Stavanger, Norway's oil capital and self-proclaimed energy capital of Europe, and how these can be conceptualised as imaginaries of preemptive hope. These imaginaries are framed as a promise of a new oil waiting to be realised—thus promising a status quo post-petroleum future that only requires technical adjustments. These new oil imaginaries become forms of repair and maintenance of the petroleumscape because they primarily promise to maintain the wealth, status, and privileges attained from their position in the petroleumscape—a promise that they are unable to realise. The broader implication of the study is that we need to pay more attention to the imaginable post-petroleum futures governing second-tier cities’ and regions’ economic strategies in maintaining the status quo, not just the actions of global oil majors and leading petro-states.