The 1970s marked the end of cheap, abundant and guilt-free petroleum. In the USA, long queues at the pump materialised the threats of foreign oil dependency following the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Since then, the surging global demand for energy, projections of oil depletion, and the need to manage climate change have brought forth the necessity for long-term structural change in energy systems. Most energy transitions, however, inherently become a problem of carbon, the response to which is low-carbon energy sources and a series of techno-fixes: carbon sequestration, carbon credits, carbon markets. The euphoric tone of low-carbon or carbon-free narratives is uncanny; it purges, or at least masks, carboniferous matters while perpetuating a series of myths, notably that ‘any newly discovered source of energy is assumed to be without faults, infinitely abundant, and to have the potential to affect utopian changes in society. These myths persist until a new source of energy is used to the point that its drawbacks become apparent and the failure to establish a utopian society must be reluctantly admitted.’ The project After Oil by the architectural collaborative DESIGN EARTH presents a speculative future of the Arabian Gulf when the world has transitioned away from fossil fuels. In a series of three triptychs, After Oil renders visible the embeddedness of petroleum in a region of many oil-producing economies by charting matters of concern at three nodes in the system: an offshore oil extraction and processing facility (Das Island); a transit chokepoint (Strait of Hormuz); and the site one of the largest oil spills in history (Bubiyan Island). To imagine a society after oil foregrounds the past and present geographies of oil. Such an extrapolation of issues critical for today's oil landscape favours an approach to energy transitions that upholds the geographies of technological systems – their processes, sites, objects and externalities.

Das Island, Das Crude

Das Island is a major offshore Emirati oil and gas industrial facility. Oil production began following prospecting during the 1950s and has since financed the urbanisation of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, with many of the country's iconic buildings built from oil wealth. Although such territories of extraction are critical to urban development, they are out of sight and often external to urban representation.