The dominance of oil as an energy source persists because of how the substance has been and continues to be culturally imagined. In September last year I visited the U.S. state most associated with oil production, and ‘energy capital of the world’, Houston, Texas, to explore how a ruling imaginary of oil has materialised through place, from local neighbourhoods to the city’s configuration, and spaces which memorialise and educate about its industrial history.
I am interested in how imaginaries of oil shape places; I want to understand how oil’s inevitability is continually manufactured and (re)strengthened in a multitude of interconnected and mutually supportive ways. This blog is a brief journey through selected petro-geographies I encountered on my research trip to Texas. These oily places are intrinsically connected: no place can be understood in separation as each enables the existence of another, be it materially, imaginatively, economically, or historically. My research into these places, and other spaces connected to them, seeks to comprehend petro-geographies through their contradictions. How has wealth been accumulated, and power consolidated through oil production? How is oil imagined and re-materialised in this region most associated with its production?
Navigating Houston
Firstly, there is the question of mobility in which oil is central. Visiting Houston with the aim of exploring different areas within and outside the city and without the ability to drive, presented problems. While Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States, its public transport network is limited. In attempting to traverse the city through walking (already an impossible task, due to its size), I often encountered emptiness. Even in central areas sidewalks were largely unoccupied, giving the feeling of walking through a ghost town. Walking an hour south of downtown, sidewalks dissolve into grassy verges and narrow dirt tracks, sometimes disappearing completely.
Buffalo Bayou
The Buffalo Bayou is a river that flows through Houston’s centre. During a boat tour detailing the city’s history in relation to the river, it was explained that Houston was founded on the bayou’s banks; its expansion outwards was precipitated by the rapid development of the automobile industry, itself an expression of the growing oil industry. Present day difficulties in getting around demonstrate how everyday practices have been configured through oil dependence. A document released by the City of Houston in 2020, outlining plans to make the city more walkable, describes Houston as an ‘auto-centric city’; “We drive to work. We drive to eat. We drive to shop. We even drive to the convenience store two blocks away”[i]. Oil is woven into the fabric of Houston through the possible means and pathways by which the city is navigated daily. The changing function and influence of the river tells this story; oil has changed and expanded the geography of the city. In relation to industry, the importance of the bayou has shifted downstream; as it flows east, Buffalo Bayou becomes the Houston Ship Channel, a globally significant waterway enabling the international import and export of oil.
Spindletop Hill
The former oil field of Spindletop, located in Beaumont, Texas, was pivotal to the United States development of oil as a fuel input. After initial struggles to extract oil at the site, an abundance was discovered in 1901. Discoveries made there, and prompted by the site’s success, led to the revolutionising of transport and industry in Texas and throughout the U.S. Because of its significance, I visited Spindletop Boomtown Museum, just over an hour’s drive from Houston, where the oil town of Gladys City has been recreated for visitors in a monument and celebration of its’ history.
Gladys City was envisioned as an ‘industrial utopia’ by Pattillo Higgins, the self-taught geologist convinced that Spindletop Hill would produce oil. Present-day experiences of navigating Houston respond to these histories. The history of oil extraction is venerated at such sites as the birthplace of corporate wealth and power and contemporary ways of living. While our continued dependence on oil is conceptualised as an inevitability in the present, with energy companies professing their role in ‘powering civilisation’[ii] and ‘making modern life possible’[iii], the practices of making place through oil production evidenced in Spindletop paved the way for this state of being.
The Wiess Energy Hall
The Houston Museum of Natural Science includes a whole floor dedicated to the history of energy. Renovation of the Wiess Energy Hall was funded by energy companies including Saudi Aramco, BP America, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil, among others. The corporatised museum space takes us on a journey through the history of oil production in Texas, with exhibits venerating discoveries such as hydraulic fracturing, interactive games such as ‘Can you frack it?’, monuments to drill bits and models of offshore drilling platforms. The displays take on a tone which celebrates the cooperation and mastery of geology by engineering, seen as a feat enabling modern life.
On the floor below the Energy Hall, there is an exhibit on American history. One display observes that Native Americans never ceded the land on which Houston is built, which resides in the traditional homelands of the Karankawa, Coahuiltecan, Atakapa-Ishak, and Sana peoples. It is stated that Native Americans suffered trauma, and loss of land, culture and languages, ever since Europeans invaded.
Visiting this part of the museum, you learn that between 1776–1887, 1.5 billion acres of land were stolen from native peoples.
The Energy Hall boasts that there are over 10,000 oil fields in Texas, making it one of the most active and successfully drilled oil regions in the world. The deep geological history of Texas is recounted: ‘Texas was built upon layers of salt miles thick, sedimentary deposits of ancient rivers, and coral reefs that once covered a lively ocean floor’. These lively origins are the source of Houston’s success as a city founded in 1836 on native lands. However, the histories told of petro-geographies are selective. The founding of Houston, and its prosperity through oil, was made possible because of philosophies established centuries earlier that enabled native histories and ways of belonging to be erased, sanitised and made passive in the present, through the imposition of European value systems intended to accumulate wealth and power for white settlers. Such constructed systems saw place belonging valued only for its capability for improvement.
Observing the jarring juxtaposition of histories recounting the violent dispossession of native peoples, adjacent to displays affirming and celebrating oil extraction and the selective accumulation of wealth through these same lands, is illustrative of the inherently empty and contradictory ideology of capitalism that has worked through these landscapes.
The Energy Corridor District
The contradictory nature of capitalism is made evident in two neighbourhoods on opposite sides of Houston. Firstly, there is the Energy Corridor District, where many globally significant companies are headquartered, including BP and ConocoPhillips. The area boasts of ‘thousands of acres of parks and open space, good schools’[iv]; walking around the district, there are signposted hiking and cycling routes, established footpaths, and a multitude of parks with a variety of plant species. The area promotes itself as a neighbourhood where nature thrives, as do its residents, and a slogan of the district is ‘Energy is Community’.
Signage welcoming you into the district is dominated by symbols of green energy, such as solar panels, wind farms, and electric cars, as well as pictures of people running and cycling through green landscapes, the earth at their feet, blooming colourful flowers and bright skies. The Energy Corridor is sandwiched between two large bodies of green space, including George Bush Park and Addicks Reservoir, and there are no refineries in its vicinity.
Hartman Park
On the other side of the city, there is the community of Manchester which borders multiple petrochemical refineries residing on the banks of the Houston Ship Channel. Manchester’s residents are predominantly Hispanic and low-income. The air is contaminated with pollutants, including benzene and formaldehyde, and health issues such as asthma and cancer are frequently reported[v]. Navigating the area by foot is difficult due to a lack of infrastructure, with sidewalks infrequent in the neighbourhood surrounding Hartman Park, which sits adjacent to Valero’s Houston refineries. The park is home to a community centre, children’s playground, and sports court. Visiting the park on a weekday afternoon, the acrid smell hits you immediately, and the sound of machinery is a constant in the background.
Political Context and Questioning Inevitability
The current political context of the U.S. gives studying the dominance of oil particular salience. Although it is important to note that under the Biden Administration, the country became the largest producer of oil worldwide. The rise of oil production in the U.S. receives particular focus during Republican presidencies but is in no way limited to them.
In his bid for re-election to the United States’ presidency, Donald Trump reignited the 2008 Republican campaign slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”, expressing his desire for the increased drilling of oil and gas by conjuring up an imaginary of energy scarcity. This corresponds to an illusory reality; the U.S. has led oil production worldwide for several years and produces more oil annually than ever before[vi]. After Trump took office on January 20th this year, he declared a national energy emergency and issued an executive order to ‘Unleash American Energy’[vii]. The order states, “America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our Nation’s economic prosperity”[viii], proclaiming it in the national interest to “unleash” the country’s natural resources to restore prosperity and rebuild economic and military security. This shifting political landscape underlies my research in Texas, which weaves together different places to try to understand how capitalism makes places through oil, and how oil is placed.
Contemporary life in the places explored here corresponds to how oil has been practiced and imagined over time and in the present. This process extends far back. Connecting current industrial practices and ways of being through oil with its’ material history enables us to engage with modern landscapes as initiated and informed by how plankton, algae and bacteria died millions of years past. To fully absorb the limits of a world reliant on fossil carbons, it is necessary to understand how power and capital rely on the continued extraction of these dead creatures.
NOTES
[i] Hailea Schultz, ‘New Infrastructure Projects Aim to Enhance Walkability in Houston’, accessed 21 January 2025, https://www.houston.org/news/new-infrastructure-projects-aim-enhance-walkability-houston.
[ii] ‘What We Do’, ConocoPhillips, accessed 3 February 2025, https://www.conocophillips.com/what-we-do/.
[iii] ‘What We Do’, ExxonMobil, accessed 3 February 2025, https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/what-we-do.
[iv] ‘About Us’, The Energy Corridor District (blog), accessed 3 February 2025, https://energycorridor.org/about/.
[v] Aji Kusumaning Asri et al., ‘What Is the Spatiotemporal Pattern of Benzene Concentration Spread over Susceptible Area Surrounding the Hartman Park Community, Houston, Texas?’, Journal of Hazardous Materials 474 (5 August 2024): 134666, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2024.134666.
[vi] ‘United States Produces More Crude Oil than Any Country, Ever – U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)’, accessed 3 February 2025, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545.
[vii] ‘Unleashing American Energy’, The White House, 21 January 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/.
[viii] ‘Unleashing American Energy’, The White House, 21 January 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/.