The following article traces thoughts on oil landscapes in transition and questions whether the transition to low-carbon energy landscapes is overthrowing or covering the hegemonic petroleum industry.
Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, known as Eni, is an Italian multinational energy company originally established by Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli) and formally founded in 1953. Eni operates worldwide in the exploration, development, production, transportation, and marketing of petroleum, natural gas, and related products, and is among the largest integrated oil and gas companies globally, with revenue of approximately €88.8 billion in 2024 and a workforce of over 32 000 employees. In terms of customer reach, Eni supplies approximately 7.45 million households, professionals, small and medium-size enterprises, and public bodies across Italy, as well as around 2 600 large industrial firms, power generation companies, wholesalers, and distributors of natural gas for automotive use, with an additional 2.09 million customers in other European countries. According to the Carbon Majors Report (2017), which compiles historical greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the world’s largest corporate producers, Eni was responsible for approximately 0.59 per cent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions over the period 1988–2015. Following the Paris Agreement, initiatives such as Progetto Italia have promoted the redevelopment of former industrial areas for renewable energy production, including the commissioning of photovoltaic plants.
From Steam Icon to Solar Surface
Despite local initiatives to preserve industrial heritage and Ravenna’s iconic skyline, the Hamon towers, featured in Red Desert (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni, were demolished in 2024 to make way for a government-supported photovoltaic power plant. The cooling towers of the former SAROM refinery, constructed as thin hyperbolic concrete shells, were built entirely in situ and represented notable artefacts of mid-twentieth-century structural engineering. Since the 1950s, they had constituted a fixed element of Ravenna’s industrial skyline and entered wider cultural memory through their appearance in the film.
While photovoltaic installations do not emit steam, do not disturb vistas in the same way, and are often framed as locally sourced energy (excluding material extraction), Eni “plans to invest 84 per cent of its annual resources in fossil fuels and only 16 per cent in renewables” between 2024 and 2027. Is the removal of iconic concrete industrial giants justified, or is it performative? What should be done with decommissioned oil landscapes in transition towards new energy landscapes?
History of Oil Landscapes
The Apsheron Peninsula in present-day Azerbaijan, then part of Imperial Russia, is often cited as the world’s oldest industrial oil production site, where drilling began in 1846, and is today regarded as one of the earliest legacies of oil pollution and environmental neglect (see Baku). Oil Springs and Petrolia in Ontario, Canada, mark the beginnings of the oil industry in North America, where commercial deposits were discovered in 1858. A century later, at a conference organised by the American Petroleum Institute in 1959, Edward Teller warned that the greenhouse effect produced by burning fossil fuels could melt ice caps and submerge cities such as New York. Teller, also known as a principal architect of the hydrogen bomb and a member of the Hungarian-born scientific diaspora in the United States, referred to as the “Martians”, was reportedly amused by the coincidence of his initials, E.T.
Landscape architecture has also engaged oil landscapes analytically, for example, through mapping and representational projects such as Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff (and studio SCAPE), which frame extraction as a spatial system rather than a purely economic one and offer solutions for Post-Petrochemical Culture via case studies and new imaginaries.
Carola Hein, in Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape, argues that a singular, overarching landscape, the petroleumscape, “has emerged through the collaboration of diverse actors and has become an actor itself”, incrementally built over generations and embedded in societies through spatial and representational configurations. Hein traces the practices surrounding the commodity: “Over time and depending on the temporal, geographic, and larger political, economic, social, and cultural context, the various petroleum actors, with the support of the general public, have created an energy culture (see Oil Culture) with multiple feedback loops, both spatial and represented, that stabilize the system, make oil a positive and fun factor of everyday life, and effectively prevent companies and countries from making a transition from oil to other energy sources”.
When the Red Desert was first screened, people did not yet understand what it was conveying. By aesthetizing pollution and giving context to the main character Giuliana’s anxiety, as if seeing oneself in the mirror of what the landscape carries, Antonioni painted oil landscapes, acrid to life conditions. (Recommend blog by Lewis Beer, Everything That Happens in Red Desert).
VALERIO: Why is that smoke yellow?
GIULIANA: Because there is poison in it.
VALERIO: Then, if a little bird flies through it, it will die.
GIULIANA: But now the little birds know that, and they no longer fly through it.
Carbonscapes and the Petroculture Assemblage
In Carbonscapes and beyond: Conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes Norwegian geographers Håvard Haarstad and Tarje I. Wanvik describe carbonscapes as social and material landscapes of oil, defined as “spaces created by material expressions of carbon-based energy systems and the institutional and cultural practices attached to them.” Energy consumption, they argue, is as political as it is cultural, intertwined with everyday life through “petroculture” artefacts that produce feelings of freedom.
The authors criticise the perceived stability of the relationship between energy systems and society, and propose the use of assemblage theory to examine carbonscapes. Through this lens, infrastructures, technologies, built environments, and the social, cultural, and political regimes that govern them are understood not as stable systems, but as contingent “entities without essence that are held together in more or less impermanent relationships”. Seeing carbonscapes as unstable, the authors suggest, allows for a reworking of the commodity-chain framework, spanning from “extractive hot zones” through infrastructures of energy transport and distribution to urban spaces of consumption and everyday practice.
The authors identify moments of rupture—such as the disassembly of Detroit’s industrial base, the technological development of the photovoltaic market, or oil price drops and the emergence of stranded assets due to overproduction—as processes of deterritorialisation. The carbonscape assemblage, they argue, is subject to change through “its relations of exteriority with the labour market, which in turn is changed by deindustrialisation and the shift towards services”, as well as through other emergent capacities of the assemblage.
Disasters, such as Fukushima, function as assemblage converters. They affect other components of the system, setting them into transformation, and while “physical manifestations may be abandoned, [they] are more likely to be converted to other uses.” By exposing the “desertlike features, vast tailing ponds and huge open wounds” of extractive hot zones to wider audiences, imagery of environmental destruction can itself become a potential assemblage converter. Have the Hamon towers, and what they stand for in Red Desert, contributed to their demolition as part of a corporate profile-changing gesture?
Furthermore, infrastructures and energy corridors are subject to change due to territorial and political instability, such as the gas pipelines from Russia through Ukraine, or the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States, initially intended to offset crude oil imports from countries such as Venezuela or Nigeria. Lastly, the authors argue that sites of consumption and everyday practice within urban carbonscapes are also changing rapidly, citing car-free zones and shifts in mobility schemes as early examples. These fragmentary changes within the carbonscape assemblage may act as “splinters”, contributing to the deterritorialisation of car-based urban environments.
Comparable to Ravenna’s Hamon towers are the Norwegian condeeps (concrete deep-water structures): massive offshore oil platforms constructed in concrete along the coast near the “oil city” of Stavanger. These “Condeep Cathedrals” and “petrodomes”, as described by Alfred Hauge in Leviathan (1979), dominate coastal vistas, signalling both the hegemonic position of labour and Norway’s role in the global energy market. With the technological transition to subsea oil-drilling installations, many of these concrete structures have become obsolete. As dismantling is often prohibitively expensive, they have instead been repurposed as cultural or residential amenities, retaining the concrete tower as “a symbolic and emotional icon of the bygone era”.
Performative Deterritorialization
However, while agreeing with the critique of carbonscapes as coherent systems, other authors stress that conversions and transitions towards greener energy can be largely performative. In The maintenance of carbonscapes: Enacting Net Zero in Stavanger, Norway, Anders Riel Müller and Siddharth Sareen point out that Norway’s leadership in green transition is balanced against continued and profitable oil and gas exports.
Promised carbon removals aimed at achieving “net zero”, the authors argue, function as a performative carbon-mitigation strategy that sustains carbonscapes through what is termed “predatory delay” — “deliberately slowing a required transition so vested interests can extract maximum wealth out of business as usual”. Oil and gas extracted and exported offshore are not accounted for, as climate neutrality frameworks focus primarily on territorially bounded emissions.
While Norway is presented as a leading net-zero country and engages in carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects such as Longship, which is intended to remove approximately 1.6 per cent of Norway’s total CO₂ emissions by transporting carbon through pipelines to subsea reservoirs, Stavanger—the former “oil capital”, now rebranded as an “energy capital”—continues to host major events for oil- and gas-related industries. Stavanger is described as an “exemplary oxymoronic site that combines centrality [of reliance on oil and gas] with declared green transition ambitions”.
Müller and Sareen argue that in times of rupture, repair and maintenance through accommodating net-zero policies are “essential for upholding the hegemony of the carbonscape”. The “permanent frontier”, they argue, is constantly in the making and can be remade or undone. The “history of energy shows that there is no permanent source, that change is the only constant, but that political constituencies are tightly linked with commitments deeply embodied in the massive global oil infrastructure”. Permanent frontiers are those sites of extraction where “hegemony is upheld through the absorption and accommodation of critique and resistance, avoiding rupture” within the carbonscape assemblage.
Stavanger, similar to Ravenna, developed as an oil and gas centre in the 1960s, but has since experienced instability due to geopolitical shifts, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which triggered rising oil prices, as well as crises linked to pandemics. These events have reopened discussions about the transition towards more stable forms of prosperity. In the search for “the new oil”, industrial investments in technological innovation, smart-city schemes, offshore wind, CCS, and the electrification of oil-extraction platforms—and, in a wider scope, proposals such as deep-sea mining—form part of a discourse that critics describe as aiming “to greenwash fossil fuels”, while maintaining a strong footing in the oil industry. The social reproduction of carbonscapes is maintained through educational campaigns and the provision of welfare-state services, leaving Stavanger described as a “status quo utopia”.
The spatial petroleumscape, beyond its industrial, infrastructural, and retail layers, also encompasses forms of philanthropy that often revitalise urban contexts, support arts and architecture, and fuel a representational petroleumscape through popular culture (see Hein). While Ravenna constructs solar fields onshore, its offshore fleet of gas platforms continues to grow. What would Red Desert in 2026 look like without yellow acrid smoke and columns of steam, and where would it be filmed? What would cause Giuliana’s anxiety, and would she still wear nylon stockings against fire?
