Mental Oil Spills: Visualising Petroleumscapes to Uncover Petro‐Hegemony in Stavanger, Norway

ABSTRACT With the urgent need to address climate change, it is critical to confront fossil fuel dependency, particularly in the Global North. This requires confronting the spatio‐cultural dimensions of fossil fuels, including how they have become embedded in those locations most closely tied to the fossil fuel industry. This article integrates insights from energy geographies with Hein's concept of petroleumscape to unpack how oil is embedded in Stavanger, Norway's oil capital. This article argues that attention must be paid to local petroleumscapes in order to better unpack how fossil fuel dependency becomes spatially embedded in locally differentiated ways, while simultaneously reinforcing a global petroleumscape. Through qualitative participatory mapping, the article visualises perceived spatialities of petroleum by Stavanger's citizens. Empirically, the article finds that although petroleum is seen as at once hyper‐visible and obscured, the city is characterised by a petro‐omnipresence. Furthermore, the article finds that petroleum produces a particular social space through the funding of public goods, while also producing social inequalities that are experienced spatially through unequal housing patterns and leisure activities. These insights contribute to uncovering the obscured, yet all‐encompassing influences of petroleum on social–ecological spaces in a highly oil‐dependent and oil‐producing region.