Seas of change: An evolving imaginary of offshore energy capture on the United Kingdom's Continental Shelf

Abstract

The offshore waters surrounding the United Kingdom have been an important national space for energy capture for over six decades. Hosting oil and gas production, large-scale renewable electricity generation and potential sites for carbon storage, the United Kingdom's Continental Shelf is now a key site within national plans for energy transition and pathways to net zero. This paper critically examines an evolving national imaginary of energy capture on the United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS) since the 1960s. It deploys the conceptual framework of sociotechnical imaginaries to explore offshore energy materials and infrastructures as key sites through which shared ideas about nationhood, modernisation and the exercise of geopolitical leadership are reproduced. Drawing on historical and contemporary energy policy documents, we argue that the potential for energy capture on the UKCS has served as a critical ‘imaginative resource’ over time for constructing national visions of social order. We identify and analyse four distinct phases in the evolution of this imaginary about the role of offshore energy capture in national life: economic recovery, market society, energy transition, and net-zero basin. The paper's novel focus on offshore energies expands understanding of the state's role in forging and sustaining a national imaginary around distributed energy materials and infrastructures. By exploring how a sociotechnical imaginary takes shape around certain material qualities offshore, and how these qualities are then a source of (generative) friction in the evolution and sustainability of the imaginary over time, we advance work at the intersection of materialities and sociotechnical imaginaries.