Energy Logistics of the North Sea

Abstract

Spaces of ocean-borne energy logistics and their landside extensions around the North Sea have developed into specialised, impermeable structures of energy extraction, transportation, transformation and storage. Despite the irregular dispersal of artefacts, the combination of both fixed and mobile infrastructure weaving through the North Sea has tied single sites together into a viscous territory of logistics – both solid and liquid and therefore hard to decipher. We argue that it is precisely the traits of invisibility, seclusion, operationalization and intersecting cycles of movement in time, that identify the North Sea as a site of unfolding processes of extended urbanisation and the most expansive layer of the global petroleumscape.