Creating New FairytalesStatoil, Snøhvit, and Petroleum Exploration in the Arctic

MELISSA GJELLSTAD

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the valorizationof the process of oil extractionin the High North as exemplified in corporate films and marketing materialsproduced by Statoil, a global energy company based in Norway. In focus is thesubsea instillation of Snøhvit [SnowWhite] in the Barents Sea, an innovation onthe frontier of the energy industry in the Arctic. In dialogue with Stephanie LeMenager’s “feeling ecological” theory andworkwithpetromodernity, this articleanalyzes Statoil’s discourse in landscape, oil capitalism, and ecology to offer aninterpretation of the evolution of the subsea extraction narratives in the Arcticwaters as a new chapter in oljeeventyret [the oil fairytale] that began in Norwayover forty years ago.

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article étudie la valorisation du processus d’extraction pétrolièredans le Grand Nord, tel qu’illustré dans des films corporatifs et des outils demarketingproduits par Statoil, une société d’énergiemondiale basée enNorvège.L’accent est mis sur l’instillation sous-marine de Snøhvit [Blanche-Neige] dansla mer de Barents, une innovation à la frontière de l’industrie énergique enArctique. En dialogue avec la théorie de Stephanie Le Menager « se sentirécologique » et son travail sur la pétro-modernité, cet article analyse le discoursde Statoil dans le domaine paysager, en capitalismedu pétrole et en écologie, afinde proposer une interprétation de l’évolution des récits d’extraction sous-marinedans les eaux de l’Arctique comme nouveau chapitre à l’oljeeventyret [le conte defées du pétrole] qui a commencé en Norvège il y a plus de quarante ans.

Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota

VOLUME 22SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES

2015ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

“A lways exploring. Never satisfied.” This Statoil1 taglineencapsulates the drive behind Norway’s largest energycorporation that has been functioning on the NorwegianContinental Shelf since 1972. The first well was spudded in

the summerof 1966, andPhillips announced theNorwegians’ fabledbest Christmaspresent ever when oil was found at the Ekofisk field in December 1969. The storyof Norway’s petroleumera, appropriately labeled as oljeeventyret [the oil fairytale]in the vernacular, reads like an adventure novel of the twentieth century. Anembedded tale in that larger narrative, the history of Statoil itself in the fortyplus years since it originated is also a gripping account of exploration andendeavors.

This article extracts one particular Statoil story told about a groundbreakinginstallation north of the sixty-second parallel: Snøhvit [SnowWhite].2 This namegraces the first exclusively subsea offshore development in the Barents Seaoperated by Statoil. Marketing this cutting-edge technology and northernmostprocessing plant for the extracted natural gas brought another set of firsts, andthe evolution of their subsea technology narrative to the public is the trajectoryin focus here. This study is not based on a thorough review of all corporatemarketing from Statoil, but rather it analyzes select cornerstone pieces madeavailable to the general public via Statoil’s extensive website: Resources in theNorth, Melkøya: Soundslide, Snøhvit LNG Project, Longer, Deeper, Colder, and TreasureHunter.3 This article investigates how a global energy company headquarteredon the borders of the High North tells its Arctic story and which tropes Statoilemploys to shape constituents’ impressions of their work.

This discourse enters the entangled space between ecology and modernitythat Stephanie Le Menager calls “feeling ecological,” which in her words is “acompetition between emotional investments inmodernity aswe know it, throughits fossil fuel infrastructure, and in ecology, as the network of human-nonhumanrelations that we theorize as a given habitat” (Le Menager 2011, 27). Navigatingthis zone is the task of Statoil oil marketing and communications, in order tohandle emotionally charged connections betweennature, science, and technologyfor a general public that encompasses local and international stakeholders.

It is possible to track how Statoil has continually tailored its story about theSnøhvit installation to counter environmental criticisms and public skepticismabout exploration in the Barents Sea by sculpting a counter narrative of corporateadventure, skill, and precision. By honing its verbal and visual literacy, Statoilhas inverted the tone of its initial audiovisual narrative to re-write this Arcticfairytale of Snøhvit. What began as a cautionary plea to protect a fragile spacefrom unknown threats has matured into a self-confident assurance that Statoil’sacclimatized experts understand the conquered zone and are equipped to gofarther. The corporatemarketingmaterials propose that taming theArctic frontier

in this Oil Age is a heroic tale where elite skill, sensitivity to surroundings, andnimble adaptation justifies Statoil’s presence and activity in the region.

HistoryThe history of this northern sector belies the current confidence, for its

development had a tumultuous start. Norwegian lawmakers amended the borderlaw in 1980, and the first drilling in the Barents Sea uncovered the gas fields ofAskeladd [Ash Lad] and Albatross in 1981 and Snøhvit in 1984.4 Opinions at thetimewere likely split, for no one knew thenwhich namesake theArctic adventurewould follow. Would it end well, like the respective fairytales of the Ash Lad andSnowWhite, where the naïvely intelligent, good-heartedNorwegianprotagonistswould against all odds succeed and win the prince or princess and half thekingdom, or would this story resemble a meeting with the ill-fated bird famed tobe a sailor’s bad luck symbol that would curse the unlucky industry for movingto the High North?5While we await the ultimate verdict as the master narrativecontinues to be spun, somemight claim it had been cursed by the latter or perhapsthwarted by an evil step-parent, for high risks and poor feasibility studies shelvedall development projects in the Barents Sea until the late 1990s. During this time,Statoil developed prototype subsea well technology at the Gullfaks field thatbegan production in December 1986. Eventually the Norwegian parliamentapproved a revised plan for Snøhvit in March 2002 and construction began inJune of that year. The tables had turned and the fairytale was resumed.

The temptation to contrast the folktale Snow White to its namesake in theNorwegian oil fairytale is too great. The symbol of youth and beauty, this idealwoman was first a desired child later shunned by her parents. She survives atreacherous journey into thewilderness and lives thereafter in secluded isolation.Her only friends in exile are dwarves, the hardworking, clever men who leavehome every day to extract precious metals from deepmines. Her mere existenceprovokes either deep love or hate in those she meets, and she eventuallyovercomes all the deceptive ploys to kill her and resumes her birthright as aqueen.While scholars of SnowWhitehave argued for its literarypower as narrative,figure, andmyth, another angle of interpretationmay be to consider the Snøhvitof Norwegianpetroculture as an allegory. Assigning equivalents to the characters,plot, setting, objects, and patterns of Statoil’s Arctic story may be a productiveline of argumentation and an alternate lens with which to view Le Menager’snotion of “feeling ecological” in the High North.

Revolutionary technologyhas engineered Snøhvit, a highly desired offspringof the offshore energy development, to become an innovation of near mythicproportions in the Barents Sea. The underwater installations counter thechallenges of Arcticwaters and harsh climate, accommodate the fishing industry,and preserve the vulnerable ecological systems. Gas from surrounding fields is

68 SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES/ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

extracted via subsea wells at a depth of 250-300 meters and transported 143kilometers to shore.6 Coming onshore at Melkøya, an island just outside ofHammerfest, the gas is processed and cooled to a chilly -160°C to reach its liquidstate (called LNG henceforth) in preparation for global transport via speciallymanufactured tanker ships. The entire system functions on an astounding scalewith no visual surface trace of the offshore activity, yet itsmere existence angerssome powerful people. Its presence is revealed not by a speaking mirror, but bymoving pictures that confirm and narrate Snøhvit’s existence via visualrepresentation.

For nearly forty years the Statoilmarketing teamhas built its offshore visualreputation on another masterpiece of modern engineering and technology–theoil platformof theNorth Sea. The resilient and enormous platforms cut a strikingimage from positions on land, sea, and air, and scores of images are situated toshow the platforms’ enormous girth as if size alone empowers them with thestubborn tenacity to withstand the extraction of hydrocarbons from below theseabed. The challenge for subsea installations such as Snøhvit that have no suchmonumental visual marker at sea, forces marketing representations to beanimations or imaginative visual descriptions of the underwater technology.7

Without this visual shorthand of the platform as a symbol of innovation, newimagery must be employed to convey the equally powerful impact and energyexpertise in the High North in a new pictorial discourse. A selection of Statoil’scorporate videos offers an arc highlightingdevelopments in that representationalnarrative.

Take OneThe first film, a two-minute video entitled Resources in the North embedded

in the Statoil’s GoingNorth campaignwebpages, is rhetorically ineffective becauseit pairsmutually exclusive groupings ofwords and images.8 Conflictingmessagesin verbal and visual modalities negate each other regarding the environment,the mission, and the outcome. While the verbal message conveys a positive,persuasive tone, the resounding visual message is less that of a homegrownvigilant explorer promising to care for his backyard andmore that of an intrusivetransnational corporation resolved to disturb the natural balance of the BarentsSea.

Produced for the 2007 Statoil Sustainability report the year Snøhvit cameonline, the film juxtaposes the fragile Arctic ecosystem visually coded andidentified as endangered animals, pristine waters, and melting ice formations tothe aurally described potential of the energy reserves locked below the seabed.Thefilmopenswith a satellite viewof the rotating earth, the glowing bluemarble,and the camera zooms down to the frontier of the Barents Sea. A mystical spaceexploration soundtrack cultivates the sense of awaiting unknown discoveries

CREATING NEW FAIRYTALES 69

locked in the subsea floor of the unexplored region. Images of pack ice and opensea, underwater glowing jellyfish, fish in a feeding frenzy, and a breaching whitewhale are closely followed by ambling polar bears and calving glaciers. Thesesymbolic images,which resonate as someof the archetypal Arctic icons frequentlyemployed to advance Polar environmental justice issues, reinforce anunderstanding of nature as wild, uncivilized, and pristine as is common intraditional landscape photography. Their powerful visual display outweighs theimpact of the spoken word, which undermines Statoil’s promised integrity ofpurpose.

The deep-voicedmale voice over insists in his spoken narration that energyand environmental concerns are not mutually exclusive in the Arctic, but thatthis vulnerable natural habitat–“one of Europe’s last big intact ecosystems… thefood bowl for future generations”–is a treasured piece in an intricate puzzle thatStatoil is bothwell-prepared and best situated to solve. Citing a nearly forty-yeartrack record of responsible oil and gas exploration and extraction in the NorthSea, thenarratorunderscores that “theNorwegianpetroleum industryhas becomea laboratory for environmentally friendly technology” in recent history.Downplaying the fact that existing oil and gas reserves are on the decline, thusrequiring exploration in previously untapped fields such as the Barents Sea, thenarration attempts to establish thenecessity of the quest by relyingonvalue-ladenenvironmental imagery to persuade viewers. As the sun sets on the panorama ofthe traditional oil platform at sea after a storm, viewers are led to believe thatStatoil is entitled to drill in this new region because of its unique offshore historyand technological expertise.

This sense of entitlement resonates with a study conducted by politicalscientist Leif Christian Jensen, who has analyzed public discourse in Norwegianprint media over a six-year period and tracked the growth of what he calls the“Drilling for the Environment” debate–an argument for an evolving High Northpolicy in the early 2000s that persuaded Norwegians of the benefits of openingup the Barents Sea for oil and gas recovery before the Russians (Jensen 35). In hisstudy Jensen identified discourse co-optation atwork,meaning one side invertedthe other’s argument to gain rhetorical advantage. “Discourse co-optationdescribes howone discourse burrows into the heart of a counter-discourse, turnsits logic upside down and puts it to work to re-establish hegemony and re-gainpolitical support. One discourse is strengthenedby the addition of a new, powerfulargument; the other is weakened almost to the same degree” (Jensen 36-7). Asnorthern foreign policy concerns became increasingly oriented toward theenvironment, Norway strategically positioned itself as the most advanced andenvironmentally conscious player in theHighNorth. The evolvingmessage,whichJensen chronicles in four Norwegian newspapers, persuades Norwegians of thenotion that exploiting energy in the Arctic would be a boon for the environment,foreign policy, and the economy. “By going ahead in the Barents Sea, Norway is

70 SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES/ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

giving the Russians a helping hand, benefitting the environment and earninggood money to boot” (Jensen 35).

Statoil does not directly enter into Jensen’s analysis of the security questionsof national energy policy or discursive co-optation, for he chooses not to focuson or identify individual stakeholders; however, I detect the same discursiveovertones audible in someof the early corporateGoingNorthmarketingmaterialsproduced by Statoil. Returning again to an example in the film, the narratorechoes the optimisticmantra that energy recovery in the Barents Sea will “boostboth industrial activity and value creation” in the local environment of the farnorth. But rather than underscore thatmessage with representative place-basedimages of extraction points in Northern Norway, the visual message thataccompanies this voice recording shows the dotted lines that trace the exportpath of eventual recovered resources from the Norwegian seabed of the BarentsSea to central Europe and to the East Coast of the United States, New York inparticular.

Read this way, Statoil’s self-representation in this video becomes that of agreedy emissary devoid of agency who serves only external capitalist forcesoutside of Norway. The primary motor is not to preserve the immediate regionof impact, the communities nearest the unnamed LNG plant at Melkøya whereSnøhvit gas is piped onshore and processed, but the international consumerswhothirst for refined oil and gas. Statoil here appears unintentionally to be playinginto the hands of environmentalists opposed to drilling in theHighNorth, playingJensen’s notion of discourse co-optation in inadvertent reverse, by serving upthe most threatened elements of the region to the greediest global buyers at thehighest price.

Take TwoStatoil’s next strategy formarketing Snøhvit andMelkøya andunderscoring

the perseverance of its growing presence in the High North was to distance itselffrom the emotional images of environmental protest in the short film GoingNorthand instead situate energy infrastructure as the given. Images of vulnerableanimals and fragile landscapes were jettisoned in favour of the stark precision ofthe sleek fusion of nature and technology in petroculture.

Michael Truscello uses the term “petroculture” when analyzing Canadianphotographer Edward Burtynsky’s collection entitled “Oil: Extraction &Refinement” in light of the political inheritance from the photographymovementknown as TheNewTopographics.9Truscello reads recent landscape photographythat rejects conventional standards of the genre andnow sees “traces of an empirein ruins and a sociality to come” in Burtynsky’s work, where images of petroleumextraction and transportmeldwilderness and civilization in a newunderstandingof society that captures the tensions of the twenty-first century (Truscello 188).

CREATING NEW FAIRYTALES 71

Burtynsky presents his aesthetics as “nature transformed through industry” inhis own expression of Le Menager’s notion of feeling ecological. For Truscello,Burtynsky “complicates the observer’s relationship to agency in the Age of Oilby foregrounding the scale, technological complexity, and almost mythicalubiquity of petroculture. Absent is the bilateralism of earnest environmentalportraiture, the simplistic agential dualism that pits ‘people’ against Big Oil” (190).

While Burtynsky’s photographs evoke discomfort, they capture a beautythat is difficult to articulate. This positive spin on the splendor of sciencepermeates Statoil’s second Snøhvit marketing image. The ninety-second film, aphotographymontage entitledMelkøya: Soundslide attributed toGjertrud Lindberg,is a visual slideshow with no spoken text. The dualism of the multimodal effortin Resources in the North is eliminated for this montage, which is instead set to asoundtrack of electronica house music that could have been composed byNorwegian band Röyksopp. The hip sounds fuse stark images of outstanding graytone contrasts with bursts of vibrant colour. Off-shore orange, subsea yellow,radio tower red, andbrilliant blue splash colour amid the blinding snowwhiteouts,charcoal seas, asphalt skies, cold concrete tanks, steely aluminumpipes, and slateship hulls responsible for transforming the hydrocarbons from Snøhvit into alandscape of international power. The orange backs of the Statoil employeessuggest that these faceless innovators are responsible for preserving the brightcolours that co-exist with the pristine environment. Clearly foreign, thesecolourful markers appear not to have scarred the virgin landscape but to havecreated an equally odd and resilient cultural setting built to weather andcomplement the harsh climate of the north. The fusion of Statoil’s vision and theriches of the north has become a new petroculture in its own right.

The absolute focus in this clip on the local environment with no externalimpact (apart from thewaiting ship as transport vessel docked at port) downplaysthe risk for the local viewers by concentrating solely on the seamless functionalityof the LNGplant site. Production is underway and the new shine has not yetwornoff, but the project remains swathed in an aura of mystique. Neither apocalypticnor pastoral, these images convey a cutting-edge synthesis. With no verbal textto accompany the visual feast of the image itself, viewers are left to deduce theirown interpretations. As Burtynsky articulates in the vision for his photography,his desire is for the images to speak “asmetaphors to the dilemma of ourmodernexistence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seductionand fear.”10 Lindberg’s Melkøya: Soundslide montage balances on this same edge,retaining the inhospitable landscape yet evoking the savvy control of technology.

My reading of the local environment in this vein is inspired in part byUrsulaHeise, who argues for a revision of environmentalism that reassesses the globalscale of human impact on local natural and cultural landscapes. Heise advocatesin her 2008 book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet that a challenge to“environmentalist conceptions of place” is to “imagine local environments […]

72 SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES/ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

as habitats that are ceaselessly being reshaped by the encroachments of the globalas well as by their own inherent dynamism” (114). While this is hardly a call fora pro-industry stance, this film conveys the tone of local partnership andacclimatization that Statoil needed to strike. In a move perhaps reminiscent ofJensen’s discourse co-optation, I suggest that Statoil’s message in this visualslideshow seems to have struck a balance between environmental protection,economic development, and resource exploitation in order to create a visualnarrative that demands a reconsideration of its corporate agency in the Arctic.

Take ThreeA third film in this same vein further constructs Statoil’s image as a good

neighbour in the Barents Sea. This animated video titled simply Snøhvit LNGProjectoversimplifies the process from extraction to export in relation to the fishingindustry. As in the Resources in the North opening, the screen opens to a map ofEurope and the camera zooms in toNorway and the Barents Sea, identifying fromabird’s-eye view the location of the Snøhvit field andunderwater link toMelkøyajust outside of Hammerfest. Diffuse ocean noises give way to seagull cries as thebirds in question circle an incoming trawler. The animated camera dives belowthe surface and sinks down past the trawler’s lines to the subsea yellowinstallations anchored on the ocean floor. A school of fish swims past, chased bythe trawler’s nets, both predator and prey unimpeded in their journey by thesubsea well. New sound tones begin as a 3-D cross-section of the sea floor fallsaway to indicate graphically how some wells extract gas while others inject CO₂deep into the Earth. Colour-coded as blood vessels where oil replaces oxygen, thecamera leaves the blue energy-poor CO₂ pipes and follows the red energy-richgas stream toMelkøyawhere an oversimplified floor plan of the island traces thetransformation of raw gas to LNG. The awaiting tanker departs with its cargo andmeets on its outbound journey the trawlers coming home from fishing at sea.After passing as friendly neighbours, the tanker morphs into a red dash on theinitial European map, leaving Hammerfest heading south and west in order toindicate the scope of delivery.

This animation downplays the harsh regional conditions by insisting thatthe Norwegian energy industry can withstand and adapt to this climate as wellas the fishing industry has done–all while recognizing the importance of thefishing lifestyle and the industries’ ability to coexist. Indeed it resonates with thepartnerships Statoil always has enjoyedwith the fishers south of the sixty-secondparallel. This reinforces themessage that communications scholars Øyvind Ihlenand Michael Nitz identify in their analysis of how the rhetorical framing of theSnøhvit media debate in terms of coexistence presented the argument that“petroleum activity posed no threat to the fishing industry or the environment”(7). Apart from the maps framing the animation, there is little to no evidence of

CREATING NEW FAIRYTALES 73

the Arctic setting in this film. This is offshore business as usual, or at least aprojection of the new norm that Statoil is striving to establish in the subseaadventure narrative. The goal is to build a subsea factory on the seabed; thecorporate vision, according to Statoil Senior Vice President for TechnologyExcellence Siri Espedal Kindem, is to go longer, deeper, and colder to acquireglobal energy resources.11

The film also signifies an acceptance and recognition of the overall state ofpetromodernity where animated short films join other “aesthetic images andenvironmental emotions that valorize… theprocess of oil extraction” (LeMenager2012, 62). LeMenager’s research on the aesthetics of petromodernity investigatesart within “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possibleby petroleum” (Le Menager 2012, 60). Although this study focuses more on thecontent of the individual films than the process of their creation, it is telling totrace the evolution of environmental emotions of these Statoil short films. Toreiterate the core of this artistic investigation, in Truscello’swords, “By expandingour understanding of distributed human and non-human agencies in‘petromodernity,’ we can better recognize the shifting intensities of petroculturalassemblages” (193). If these Statoil films collectively can be granted status as anassemblage, then parsing the tensions embedded in the multimodal chronicle ofthis new subsea extraction narrative affords better understanding of Statoil’sofficial Snøhvit story to a critical public.

The Trailer for the Next ReleaseIt remains to be seen, perhaps, howSnøhvitwill actually align to the fairytale

Snow White. Critics may already perceive the tale as an ecocritical allegory,intended to illuminate the hazards of twenty-first-century petroculture. Statoilarguably has framed this multimodal narrative with the intent and hope that itwill deliver the anticipated fairytale ending. The figure of SnowWhite is the idealof perfection and beauty, the fairest of them all; in the offshore petroleumindustry, the new ideal outgrowth of Snøhvit is described as equallysuperlative–the underwater factory with seafloor installations that functionwithout surface displacement in increasingly inaccessible locations. Subseatechnology is a fusionofmeetingenvironmental concerns andboostingproductionthat mediates conflict between dueling perspectives on energy and ecology.Statoil’s marketing story of Snøhvit models energy exploration in the BarentsSea and chronicles changes in the energy worldview in petromodernity.

A parting example of the latent power of this new Arctic fairytale returnsfull circle to Statoil’s role in shaping the narrative of Norway’s oljeeventyr. Aone-minuteStatoil televisioncommercial depicts a bedtime storywhere adaughterinquires about her daddy’s job. This innocent, realistic scene transforms into afantastic animatedbedtimeadventurewhere thepair travels as “treasurehunters”

74 SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES/ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

to answer the girl’s questions and search for the underwater riches that “theworld needs in order to function.”12Because there ismuch less treasure now thanthere used to be, the inquisitive girl’s daddy tells her, the journey to the treasureis more difficult and dangerous. And once it is found, they still need to figure outhow to retrieve it. When the daughter questions if success is even possible, thedaddy answers that it almost defies the possible. Marketing innovation to a newgeneration coming of age in this era of petromodernity still relies heavily on thefairytale and adventure narrative, luring impressionable viewers at an early ageinto the fantasticmysteries of the deep. The commercial’s closing printed taglineat the bottom of the screen reads: “The Norwegian oil adventure has never beenmore exciting.” Statoil, the powerful narrator, enchants an ageless audiencewithdaring tales of adaptable, clever heroes on the technological frontier who arenavigatingnew landscapes, ever-curious, and “always exploring–never satisfied.”13

NOTES

1. http://www.statiol.com/.2. This is the long-held northern border for hydrocarbon exploration in the Norwegian

Sea.3. All videos originally found on http://www.statoil.com are listed in the references.4. The Ash Lad in Norwegian folklore is akin to the heroine of the Cinderella story.5. The word albatross can be used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden that

feels like a curse, according to GaryMartin, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “TheRime of the Ancient Mariner.”

6. See the Statoil Snøhvit homepage: http://www.statoil.com/en/ouroperations/explorationprod/ncs/snoehvit/pages/default.aspx.

7. The most successful Statoil video that contextualizes the scope of the subseadevelopments is the eleven-minutefilm Longer, Deeper, Colder.Because this film focuseson the development of subsea technology as a whole and not just the Snøhvitinstallation, I chose to exclude it from the primary analysis of this article although itdoes resurface briefly in the conclusion.

8. I was unable to find any earlier films on the Statoil website, so I assume this to be thefirst and reference it as “Resources in the North.”

9. This 1970s movement “engaged American landscapes as the scarred and decayingbyproducts of capitalist exploitation” (Truscello 189). Some of Burtynsky’s images areavailable on his homepage: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com.

10. Burtynsky’s artist statement “Exploring the Residual Landscape” reads thus: “Naturetransformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course tointersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals,oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjectsthat are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine

CREATING NEW FAIRYTALES 75

tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience,yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.These images aremeant as metaphors to the dilemma of ourmodern existence; they

search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We aredrawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciouslyaware that theworld is suffering for our success. Our dependence onnature to providethe materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet setsus into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools ofour times.”

11. See the interviewwith Espedal Kindem (excerpt from10:29-11:20) on the Longer, Deeper,Colder film.

12. See the Statoil TV Commercial Skattejeger [Treasure Hunter].13. This quotewas a Statoilmarketingphrasewhen the Skattejeger commercialwas released.

It is visible in older marketing campaign images such as this example, entitled“Determination is our nature.” See image at: http://gullblyanten.no/media/uploads/1868/7050-a73d1-archive.pdf. The stated webpage http://neversatisfied.statoil.comis no longer accessible. The currentmarketing campaign is “Kraften i detmulige” [ThePower of Possible] and that concept was launched onMay 5, 2014. See a new animatedfilmon this themeat http://www.statoil.com/en/NewsAndMedia/Multimedia/Pages/ThePowerOfThePossible.aspx. See an updated subsea industry film in Norwegianentitled Nordmenn are gode på bunn [Norwegians are good to the core] at http://kraftenidetmulige.no/nb/reservoir on the Statoil homepage.

REFERENCES

Burtynsky, Edward. Artist’s Statement. “Exploring the Residual Landscape.”Copyright1985-2013.AccessedMarch23, 2015.http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/About/introAbout.html.

Heise, UrsulaH. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imaginationof the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ihlen, Øystein, and Michael Nitz. 2008. “Framing Contests in EnvironmentalDisputes: PayingAttention toMedia andCulturalMaster Frames.” InternationalJournal of Strategic Communications 2 (1): 1–18.

Jensen, Leif Christian. 2012. “Norwegian Petroleum Extraction in Arctic Watersto Save the Environment: Introducing ‘Discourse Co-optation’ as a NewAnalytical Term.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (1): 29–38.

Le Menager, Stephanie. 2011. “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Artsof Grief.” Qui Parle 19 (2): 25–55.

⸻. 2012. “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!” American Literary History 24(1): 59–86.

76 SCANDINAVIAN-CANADIAN STUDIES/ÉTUDES SCANDINAVES AU CANADA

Lindberg, Gjertrud, and Statoil ASA. Ed. Statoil ASA. 2009.Melkøya: Soundslide.Snøvhit—Unlocking Resources in the Frozen North. Updated November 23,2009. AccessedMarch 23, 2015. http://www.statoil.com/en/OurOperations/ExplorationProd/ncs/Pages/SnohvitNewEnergyHistoryInTheNorth.aspx.

Martin, Gary. n.d. “An albatross around one’s neck.” The Phrase Finder. AccessedMarch 23, 2015. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/30800.html.

Statoil ASA. 2007. Sustainability Report 2007: Going North. Accessed August 17, 2013.http://www.statoil.com/en/EnvironmentSociety/Sustainability/2007/Downloads/Paper%20report.pdf.

—. 2010. Snøhvit LNG Project. Uploaded April 30, 2010. Accessed March 23, 2015.https://youtu.be/RWtB_BX1K0E.

—. 2011a. Longer, Deeper, Colder. Uploaded December 20, 2011. Accessed March 23,2015. https://youtu.be/BuxFvzHOxhg.

—. 2011b. Skattejeger [TreasureHunter]. TreasureHunter commercialwith Englishsubtitles. Uploaded November 4, 2011. Accessed March 23, 2015. https://youtu.be/dr32Xz6F9w0.

Truscello, Michael. 2012. “The New Topographics, Dark Ecology, and the EnergyInfrastructure of Nations: ConsideringAgency in the Photographs of EdwardBurtynsky andMitchEpstein fromaPost-Anarchist Perspective.” Imaginations3 (2): 188–205.

CREATING NEW FAIRYTALES 77