Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea

HANNAH APPEL University of California, Berkeley Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea A B S T R A C T Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of “modularity”—mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work in Equatorial Guinea to function “just like” offshore work elsewhere. Anthropologists often characterize as naive the simplifications of modular processes, the evacuation of specificity they entail. Yet for the industry in Equatorial Guinea, this evacuation of specificity was neither mistake nor flaw. Tracing the making of modularity shows how corporations can appear removed from local entanglements and also helps to clarify the “how” of capitalism—the work required to frame heterogeneity and contingency into the profit and power found in many global capitalist projects. [oil, capitalism, work, modularity, Equatorial Guinea] he morning of March 1, 2008, dawned warm in Bata, Equato- rial Guinea’s second city. At 6:00 a.m., I stood outside the head- quarters of a large U.S.-based oil company with a small group of others—a Spanish woman, a man from Louisiana, and two Equatoguinean men—waiting to “go offshore” by helicopter. We stood quietly and not quite together, separated by the early hour and by uncertainty about one another’s purpose for being there. Eventually, an Equatoguinean driver pulled up in a company bus. As we boarded, he re- quested our identification passes, to electronically register each of our ex- its from the company compound, and then he drove us to the company’s private wing at the airport. After an airport worker searched our bags, we sat in a small room to watch a safety video on the importance of in-flight protective equipment and what to do if our helicopter were to catch fire in midair. At liftoff, the helicopter rose effortlessly, and the city of Bata spread out beneath us. Farther from shore, behind us, the Ntem River marked the edge of the continent. After a while, the scenery faded into the calm of the open ocean seen from above, a stillness muted further by the gentle vibra- tion of the helicopter through noise-cancelling headphones. Eventually, a bright flame appeared in the distance, attached to a still-indistinct indus- trial atoll—an oil rig. Just as the rig came into view, the helicopter banked left, and we landed briefly on what looked like an aircraft carrier, leaving the Spanish woman on what was in fact a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO). With the production rig visible some hundreds of yards away, the FPSO was illuminated by its own large flare, burning the crude’s gaseous byproducts. This vast, self-propelling, shiplike structure floated above an oil field producing 100,000 barrels per day. Every ten days, a tanker would pull alongside the FPSO and leave with one million barrels. From subsea hydrocarbon deposit to the rig to the FPSO to the tanker to market, the production chain of Equatorial Guinea’s oil was clearest to me by helicopter, far off the country’s shores (see Figure 1). In this article, I trace the work that makes the view from the helicopter possible, the work that allows Equatorial Guinea to recede into the dis- tance, framing the production process—subsea to market—as “offshore.” T AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 692–709, ISSN 0094-0496, online C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 1548-1425. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01389.x