Beyond Logistical Efficiency: How Social Conflict and Local Content Shape Siting Decisions for Shore Base Infrastructure in Offshore Energy Projects

The strategic siting of shore bases, onshore facilities that support offshore energy operations, is traditionally approached as a problem of logistical efficiency, emphasizing distance, port capacity, and transport infrastructure. However, in emerging offshore frontiers, decision‐makers must simultaneously balance logistical, social, and local content considerations that are difficult to incorporate into conventional location analysis. The objective of this paper is to quantify how these dimensions are traded off against one another by operationalizing shore base location decisions within a discrete choice framework. A stated preference experiment was conducted with 60 professionals from Colombia's offshore oil and gas sector, each completing eight binary choice tasks (480 observed choices), and analyzed through Multinomial Logit and Hierarchical Bayes models. Port infrastructure emerged as the most influential attribute: its absence carries a trade‐off equivalent to 385 km of additional distance. Yet social conflict outweighed several traditional logistical considerations once explicit trade‐offs were introduced, with respondents willing to travel on average approximately 250 km further to operate in areas of low social conflict, whereas local content attributes exerted limited influence on siting decisions. A preference‐based segmentation via hierarchical clustering identified four distinct strategic profiles, revealing substantial heterogeneity behind these averages. By demonstrating how discrete choice methods can operationalize infrastructure location decisions that jointly involve engineering, social, and local content criteria, this study advances the facility location literature and provides a transferable framework for conflict‐sensitive planning in emerging offshore energy regions.