Offshore Petroleum Politics: A Changing Frontier in a Global System

Off-shore oil and gas development is often thought of as a classic mature staple sector, where hydrocarbons are extracted from a remote and physically challenging hinterland, by highly capitalised enterprise, to realise profit from sale and consumption in distant markets. There are, however, reasons to look more closely at this political economy of the offshore domain, particularly from the perspective of Hutton's post-staples hypothesis. To begin, offshore oil and gas is a relative late-arrival to the staple trade. This means that its regulatory regimes have been infused with social policy concerns that were not present in the formative eras of terrestrial petroleum. Other features arise from the “offshore” location, where a thrust toward integrated oceans policy has emerged in recent decades and threatens to erode the sectoral autonomy of the petroleum domain. Offshore oil and gas developments are one of the new “unconventional” energy sources which have emerged in Canada over the last two decades as oil prices have risen and conventional domestic sources declined.