The materiality of offshore oil fields and Asian energy regimes

A brief longue durée history of changing energy regimes in terrestrial and oceanic Asia, analysed within the framework of global changes in energy regimes, will emphasize the crucial importance of the period between the 1890s and the 1970s for Asian political elites in developing offshore oil fields into ‘powerful’ contributors to the oceanic Anthropocene. An energy transition can be defined as the gradual shift from a specific pattern of energy provision to a new state of an energy system.Footnote ¹⁸ While such energy transitions constitute global phenomena, their impacts, speeds, and fuel mixes strongly differed locally.Footnote ¹⁹ The long period before the onset of the Anthropocene in the middle of the twentieth century saw several such global energy transitions. Terrestrial ones ranged from the mastering of fire to the use and cultivation of plant biomass as fuels, such as in the form of wood and charcoal; the tapping of animal muscle power, turning animals into prime movers; since the eighteenth century the transitions from biomass to fossil fuels and from animate to inanimate, mechanical prime movers, such as steam engines; followed today by a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, such as wind and solar energy.Footnote ²⁰ Most importantly, Asia’s marine spaces lacked the specific flora and fauna that defined Asia’s terrestrial pre-fossil fuel economies. In terrestrial Asia, domesticated animals—among them cattle, horses, goats, Arabian and Bactrian camels, donkeys, water buffalos, yaks, Bali cattle, and gayals—or tamed ones like elephants were central elements in the energy regimes of these pre-fossil fuel economies.Footnote ²¹ While carps and other sweet water fish were domesticated, though not as prime movers, the same did not happen to any big marine mammals, such as whales, therefore preventing a marine equivalent to terrestrial husbandry of prime movers or the use of their dung as biofuel.Footnote ²² Capture fisheries and whaling during the early nineteenth century became rampant with the arrival of Western whaling ships in Asia’s West Pacific waters. For decades, whaling ships commercially extracted large amounts of an actual oceanic biofuel, whale oil, until cheaper lamp oils increasingly displaced it during the second half of that century.Footnote ²³ In contrast, seaweed farming as a form of mariculture remained confined to a few shallow coastal regions, and seaweed species were not used as and further bred into a biofuel, unlike terrestrial plants.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, watermills that existed since ancient times and were powered by river flows, like later hydroelectric dams, did not find equivalents in the ocean, where the energy of currents could not be harnessed, except by ships.Footnote ²⁵ Such ships also tapped offshore wind power, which windmills could not yet utilize. Altogether, if seen from the perspective of terrestrial energy transitions, Asian marine spaces remained in the very early stage of a biomass, pre-fossil fuel economy until the late nineteenth century—and many of them decades longer. A few had experienced a temporary peak in whale oil extraction, long after the invention of fire. However, suddenly, further emphasizing the different oceanic temporality, many Asian marine spaces skipped the millennia-long terrestrial transition of utilizing more biofuels and tapping animal muscle power. They also left out the first part—the Age of Coal—of the new and increasingly global fossil fuel economy. Instead, they rushed to the exploitation of offshore oil and into the Asian Anthropocene.

Energy transitions are closely entangled with technological advances and new imaginations of economy and society. To understand the consequences of the tremendous changes in terrestrial energy regimes that Asian political elites were eager to set into motion during decolonization, one needs to realize the connection to the ocean as a fuel provider. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the ghost acreage that marine spaces contributed to fuel production was limited to the aforementioned short peak in whale oil production. Ghost acres here refer to the additional acres gained by a country through outsourcing commodity production overseas, such as the food and raw materials produced in the British Empire for consumption or processing in Britain, as analysed, for example, by Kenneth Pomeranz.Footnote ²⁶ Simultaneously, one of the major factors for Britain’s Industrial Revolution and one origin of the Anthropocene was the use of fossil fuels to escape the Malthusian environmental-spatial constraints of a biofuel economy. The pressure of continuous deforestation and wood scarcity that peaked in Britain in the eighteenth century was lessened through the increasing use of coal fields or ‘subterranean forests’, as Rolf P. Sieferle called them.Footnote ²⁷ Globally, the British economy’s need to use coal as a forest substitute put it into a special position. The demand for large amounts of coal and the favourable contingency of field locations, making them easily accessible, then constituted an important environmental-geographical difference to, for example, precolonial India, still in possession of large forests, or China, characterized by large distances between major coal fields and population centres.Footnote ²⁸ According to Vaclav Smil’s calculations in 2010, supplanting the global total power generated by fossil fuels that year with plant biomass in order to become carbon-neutral would require at least 12,500,000 km² of barrier-free land (not to mention fertilizer and water) for industrial forestry.Footnote ²⁹ This spatial demand is roughly an equivalent of the entire territories of the United States and India. Accordingly, Asian countries’ growing use of energy-dense fossil fuels since the nineteenth century was based on subterranean space that substituted demand for forest space. Returning to the ghost acres, offshore oil fields, completely dwarfing the amounts of whale oil extracted from the ocean, for the first time in history created a vast expanse of oceanic ghost acres which substituted demand for forest space. Consequently, when oceanic ghost acres of offshore oil became available, they did decrease fuel-related environmental pressure on terrestrial space.Footnote ³⁰ The ocean hence went far beyond the provision of nutrition ghost acres. It began to provide Asian countries with amounts of energy that, due to physical space constraints, one can hardly imagine being generated by terrestrial industrial forestry or biofuel farming. Many Asian countries during the 1960s and 1970s still relying on biomass fuels, which accelerated deforestation and other problems, therefore supported their political elites’ interest in offshore oil exploration and use. Around the end of the period investigated here, in 1975, the share of offshore oil in total production varied widely among Asian countries, but in several cases it had become very substantial (see Table 1). Information on numbers of offshore platforms, their exact locations, and production amounts are scarce due to national security concerns and maritime boundaries conflicts, but also illustrate a strong rise in numbers (see Table 2). Asian political elites appropriating marine spaces that harboured Asia’s offshore fields thus created an important oceanic substitute for an otherwise much higher demand for terrestrial fuel sources, depending on where countries and markets were situated in the transition between biomass, coal, and oil.

Table 1.

Offshore crude oil production

^aTogether with Brunei.

^bTogether with Malaysia.

Sources: ‘Offshore Crude Production’, Offshore (20 June 1975): 84; Kato Masakazu, ‘Present and Future of Offshore Petroleum Developments’, in The Ocean Association of Japan (ed.), Exclusive Economic Zone, 1982: Proceedings of the 7 ^th International Ocean Symposium, October 21–22, 1982 (Tokyo: The Ocean Association of Japan, 1983), 73–80; K. O. Emery, ‘Economic Placer Deposits of the Continental Shelf’, Offshore (March 1969): 91–105; ‘Will Environment Opposition Lessen?’ Offshore (December 1973): 77–78; ‘Offshore Production Nearly 30% of Global Crude Oil Output in 2015’, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=28492, accessed 8 September 2021.

Table 2.

Mobile and production platforms

^aSouth China Sea and further Chinese and Indonesian waters.

^bSouth China Sea.

Sources: ‘Newsletter’, Offshore (April 1975): 8; ‘Mobile Drilling Rigs around the World’, Offshore (20 June 1981): 91; ‘Worldwide Production Platforms’, Offshore (20 June 1975): 88; ‘Rig Recap’, Offshore (July 1978): 8; ‘Production Platform Count’, Offshore (20 June 1978): 70; Yongxue Liu et al., ‘Satellite Data Lift the Veil on Offshore Platforms in the South China Sea’, Scientific Reports 6, no. 33623 (2016): 1–9; Yongxue Liu et al., ‘Automatic Extraction of Offshore Platforms Using Time-Series Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager Data’, Remote Sensing of Environment 175 (2016): 73–91.

When discussing the materiality of marine spaces and offshore oil fields, the main factor that globally enabled the offshore energy transition was the liquidity of oil, flowing because of gas pressure or artificially induced pressure toward an extraction point drilled from above the aquatic surface into the seabed. In contrast, the physical properties of aquatic spaces do not enable an economically feasible extraction of coal, it being solid and therefore too immobile. The ocean thus never saw an energy transition to coal. In the same way, the liquidity of oil facilitated loading and unloading of tankers and allowed the use of offshore pipelines that connected platforms and terrestrial infrastructures, while the bulkiness of coal did not result in the creation of such an offshore pipeline infrastructure. Likewise, the physical properties of the ocean meant that offshore oil geographies were accessible due to the aforementioned limited need for infrastructure construction compared to land. As early offshore oil production in the United States’ Mississippi River Delta, Burma’s Irrawaddy River, and other places will illustrate, aquatic spaces enabled the movement of ships and barges carrying exploration and production equipment, followed later by tankers. In contrast, operating in terrestrial regions unconnected by road or rail and without local market demand entailed prohibitive financial costs, meaning that even in the case of terrestrial oil exploration and production, coastlines and rivers were very important geographical access, export, and supply nodes. In Asia, the locations of oil fields and related physical geographies thus strongly shaped the history of when Asian political elites began to tap oceanic ghost acres.

The development of early Japanese offshore oil production in a global context

Japan is arguably one of the first countries in which offshore oil drilling took place.Footnote ³¹ Historical records show that at least since the seventh century, very limited oil harvesting had taken place in Echigo Province (now Niigata Prefecture) in central-west Honshu. During the late nineteenth century, when industrial and consumer demand for oil increased, the terrestrial part of the region experienced an oil field exploration boom. In the early 1880s, an oil seepage was spotted by chance in the Sea of Japan, 40 to 50 metres off the coastal town of Amase (尼瀬, now part of Izumozaki).Footnote ³² Such bubbling of oil, usually indicating gas pressure-driven releases from offshore oil fields, is a geological phenomenon that during the nineteenth century was already globally known, even though the usual reason (cracks in the seabed caused by seismic activity) was not.Footnote ³³ Rightly deducing the presence of offshore oil near Niigata Prefecture’s terrestrial wells, Japanese oil companies during the late 1880s created several extraction spots through reclamation of small islands, followed by the use of caissons to keep water out of the mining sites and hand-digging to the oil-bearing strata. The early 1890s saw an expansion of this simple offshore oil infrastructure. Consultation of an advisor from the United States resulted in the use of mechanized drilling rigs and anti-flooding technology, allowing deeper and more productive drilling.Footnote ³⁴

The geographical contingency of Japan’s coastal and offshore oil fields, resulting in unfavourable physical geographies, became a major reason why offshore oil drilling was not strongly pushed by Japanese political elites, such as members of the government or senior bureaucrats, until after WWII. There was no continuous stretch of fields from very shallow standing waters to deeper open waters, as for example in the United States’ Mississippi River Delta, where such conditions constantly advanced offshore oil technology. Considering the growing Japanese demand for oil during the imperial period, a local market existed, in contrast to several places analysed later. Without the inhibiting geographical contingency of field locations, the divergence between the ability of Japanese and US experts to exploit offshore oil fields could have been smaller and the energy transition in Asia’s waters pushed earlier by Japanese political elites. My point is that in the very late nineteenth century, when offshore oil drilling had emerged in both Honshu and Southern California, a related trans-Pacific technology transfer facilitated the Japanese offshore oil expansion. However, the geographical locations of Japanese fields later inhibited it. In 1894, as a result of many gas seepages, oil drilling began along Summerland’s beach, a coastal county in Southern California close to Santa Barbara. During the following years, derricks were erected in flood tides. Finally, in spring 1898, the Southern Pacific Railroad built a first wooden pier reaching about 7.5 metres into Pacific waters at low tide, on which derricks were set up. The pier marked the beginning of US offshore oil drilling in marine waters.Footnote ³⁵ In 1902, more than one hundred such offshore oil wells were in operation in Summerland. This offshore advance by several private companies resulted in experiments to adapt drilling technology to aquatic conditions. Sand beaches provided challenges such as subsidence, well flooding, and other drilling disasters. Wooden pilings were usually used at locations that had been selected as harbours because of calm waters, not due to the presence of oil fields, but now had to withstand stronger impacts from waves, storms, and shipworms.Footnote ³⁶ Back at Amase beach, secure access to the offshore drill sites was improved around 1900 by changing from small pathways of reclaimed land, which could easily be eroded by water movements or storms, to the use of Summerland-like wooden piers.Footnote ³⁷ At the end of the nineteenth century, the offshore oilscapes created by private companies in Niigata Prefecture and Southern California thus were not genuinely different (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Coastal drill sites and pier-connected, sheltered offshore drill sites in the Amase oil mining area (1900).

Source: Noguchi, Chiri shashinchō, 10.

Figure 2.

Beach drill sites and pier-based offshore drill sites in Summerland, California (1902).

Source: Dwight Kempton, ‘The Drilling of Submarine Oil Wells as Performed at Summerland, Cal.,’ Scientific American (18 January 1902): 36.

During the first half of the twentieth century, offshore oil drilling increasingly diverged between Japan and those regions with field locations and physical geographies that encouraged a continuous technological expansion from standing to open waters. The physical geography of the United States’ Mississippi River Delta and a few other places adapted offshore oil technology to increasingly deeper and rougher waters. From the mid-1920s, the application of new geophysical surveying technology provided more precise information on geological formations and potential oil fields. It accelerated exploration of the shallow, standing waters and tidal marshes of Louisiana’s bayous in the Mississippi River Delta, resulting in a southern expansion of aquatic drilling. In 1938, offshore oil exploration entered the bays of the Gulf of Mexico. In the process, US oil companies designed steel pilings for deeper waters, concrete caissons against water intrusions into wells, and barges hosting dredges that dug canals between bayous, which were used by submersible drilling barges hosting derricks, supported by barges providing mobility to diesel electric generators, radio equipment, and worker accommodations.Footnote ³⁸ Oil companies also circulated such technologies between regions with analogous physical geographies, which were therefore all accessible with ships, including Pacific and other beaches and waters (coastal Peru, Brunei, California, Brazil, and Egypt), shallow and largely enclosed waters (Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo), or rivers (Burma’s Irrawaddy).Footnote ³⁹ Returning to the Japanese empire, the absence of oil field locations featuring physical geographies similar to the Mississippi River Delta’s bayous meant that Japanese political elites for decades had no reason to pay attention to potential fields in deeper waters. Nippon Oil Co. (Nihon Sekiyu K.K.), which dominated about 80% of Japanese domestic oil production, certainly contributed to this lack of attention by shifting its focus during the early twentieth century from exploration work to refining imported oil.Footnote ⁴⁰ The critical point is that when environmental differences began to matter much less because of technological advances, Japanese cabinet members and senior bureaucrats had lost access to such US technology during the late 1930s and the Pacific War (1941–1945). However, oil by then had exploded in importance for the Japanese government’s decision to continue the war in China (1937–1945), considering that ultimately US-Dutch-British sanctions were the Tōjō Hideki government’s main reason for seizing the Indonesian oil wells and going to war with the United States and the Dutch government-in-exile. Knowledge about the growth of US oil production offshore of California and in the Mississippi River Delta was certainly a given. For example, related to the struggle between the federal government and several US states about legal control over offshore oil fields, US Representative Sam Hobbs (Democrats, Alabama) criticized in Congress in March 1939 that the ‘vast bulk of the oil now being extracted [from California’s offshore wells] is being sold to Japan and Japan has as much right to buy as any other purchaser, but we need that oil [for a US Navy reserve]’.Footnote ⁴¹ Even without such attention-catching statements aimed at denying oil sales to Japan, Japanese political elites knew through the companies involved in importing Californian oil about its origins—not to mention that professional oil industry journals over the course of decades had published about technological advances.Footnote ⁴²

When WWII was over, the attempts by Japanese oil experts to slightly improve the empire’s increasingly desperate oil situation through offshore drilling had resulted in nothing. For example, in occupied French-Indochina, oil seeps had been spotted in 1944 at low tide on the surface of a lagoon (Đầm Thị Nại) adjacent to the coastal city of Qui Nhon (Quy Nhơn) in central Vietnam. It resulted in exploratory drilling on both shores and, through use of a pontoon (a hollow, airtight, and thus floating structure), in the lagoon. For sure, the apparent lack of geophysical surveying equipment and exploration knowledge was a problem, since otherwise it would have been known that there was no oil field and no reason to do exploratory drilling.Footnote ⁴³ Another example was British Burma, where the Burmah Oil Co.’s and Indo-Burmah Petroleum Co.’s wells were destroyed and thus denied to the invading Japanese military.Footnote ⁴⁴ The vast majority of Burma’s contemporary oil wells were located along the banks of the Irrawaddy River. Before British colonialism, the upper Burmese (Kingdom of Ava) oil industry that exploited some of these riverside fields had relied on the Irrawaddy for shipping.Footnote ⁴⁵ When British companies increasingly became involved in Burmese oil production near the end of the nineteenth century, the river remained for some time the only practical transportation route between Rangoon, Mandalay, and other markets. This oil field geography again emphasized how important the contingency of locations was, which for economically feasible production in light of the absence of a local market needed proximity to waterways for long-distance transportation, before transportation of equipment and oil through roads, railways, or early pipelines became available. Simultaneously, local physical geography had to enable offshore drilling. At the Lanywa field (located like the bigger Chauk field near the town of Lan Ywar in upper Burma), where the Irrawaddy was about 1.6 kilometres in width, Indo-Burmah Petroleum Co. in 1925 and 1926 had walled off part of the river’s west bank through a dyke reclamation project. Constructing this reclaimed dyke wall had caused substantial engineering problems related to the summer monsoon, when strong rainfall meant that the river could rise by more than 12 metres above average and its flow accelerate to 9 km/h.Footnote ⁴⁶ Afterwards, emphasizing the global technological connections, the company used designs developed in the United States’ watery regions. Derricks were set up on piers that enabled drilling in the walled-off, slow-moving waters (see Figures 3 and 4). During the occupation, the Japanese managed to produce a very limited amount of oil at the fields, but it must be assumed that lack of technology, resources, and knowledge meant that they tapped the least damaged and most accessible terrestrial wells.Footnote ⁴⁷

Figure 3.

The photo caption reads ‘Indo-Burmah Petroleum Company’s drilling operations in the bed of the Irrawaddy River, Lanywa, Upper Burma.’ One can see the reclaimed dyke wall, which strongly reduced water movement in the west bank, and in the background the offshore oil derricks (1932).

Source: Photo. Oil Weekly 65, no. 4 (1932): 40. Courtesy: Oil Weekly.

Figure 4.

Closer look at some of the offshore oil derricks set up on piers, while the dyke wall can be seen to the left (1931).

Source: Photo. Oil Weekly 62, no. 6 (1931): 61. Courtesy: Oil Weekly.

Altogether, field locations and their physical geographies, the global trajectory of offshore oil technology advances, and ultimately dwindling access to such technology meant that after Japanese oil companies had set Asia’s first offshore oil project into motion near the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese political elites for decades played no role in moving Asia’s waters into the Anthropocene. Rather, agency rested with several private British oil companies, operating in the colonial frameworks that shaped Burma and Brunei, as will be briefly shown below. This contrast is important to understand the radical shift toward Asian political elites’ agency when decolonization—and Japan’s postwar international reintegration—allowed it.

The growing role of Asian political elites

There are strong indications that with access to US technology, Japanese wartime political elites would have been able to extract oil from new offshore wells. In August 1952, a few months after the allied occupation had ended in April, Tōhoku University received an oil sample for analysis.Footnote ⁴⁸ What indeed was oil was the result of a postwar offshore exploration endeavour off Akita Prefecture in northwest Honshu. Small oil fields along the coastline near Akita City had been discovered and exploited since the late nineteenth century, indicating that (similar to Niigata Prefecture) there were offshore fields located below the Sea of Japan. The exploration technologies used by the prospectors were based on those that had emerged in Louisiana’s bayous. Similar to submersible drilling barges designed since 1928, which hosted a derrick on top of a substructure straddling two floating units, the prospectors connected two boats, the drilling equipment elevated between them. In ten-metre-deep water, they struck oil about 27 metres below the seabed. While the related newspaper article is not very detailed, the water depth was within the exploratory drilling and production reach that US oil companies had achieved during the mid-1930s.Footnote ⁴⁹ The discovery, arguably made more than one and a half decades after it could have been made and exploited, demonstrated that importing globally circulating US technology would enable large-scale exploration projects in the waters off Asia’s terrestrial oil regions.

Without doubt, another such demonstration was British Malayan Petroleum Co. (owned by Royal Dutch Shell) in 1953 announcing its offshore expansion in British-controlled Brunei. Gas seepages had led the company to the discovery of the Seria oil field in 1929, located close to the western border in a mangrove swamp near the stream of the same name and the coastline. In particular during the winter monsoon season, flooding due to heavy rainfall had occasionally occurred, despite the millions of tons of sand that had been spread over the area to raise it about one metre. The seasonality of flooding and the focus on muddy ground nevertheless meant that no adaptation to aquatic drilling conditions took place. Global technological connections became relevant only in 1933, when a US-style pier featuring one derrick was built into the South China Sea, followed in 1936 by four derricks set up on a second, heavier and longer piling. Further projects were nevertheless limited to using new directional drilling technology that enabled drilling from beach sites into the earth below near-shore waters.Footnote ⁵⁰ The rough waves during the winter monsoon season—especially during December and January—likely meant that the two wooden piers served test purposes, and the pier option was not pursued further for the time being.Footnote ⁵¹ However, following the announcement made during the previous year, the South China Sea’s first fixed offshore platform was towed to its destination and installed in 1954. The platform used a much more robust steel jacket design that had been developed during the second half of the 1940s for the rough open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, enabling it to withstand Brunei’s winter monsoon surges.Footnote ⁵²

This example of the increasingly global use of platforms designed for open waters must have further encouraged the Japanese government to accelerate exploration of Japan’s and other waters. In late 1954, when the Hatoyama Ichirō administration was formed, this aim became a topic in the discussions regarding postwar Japan’s first Five Year Plan (1956–1960). Accordingly, in December 1955, when the Plan was finalized, a semi-public company—the Finance Ministry held the majority of shares—was founded and tasked with exploring and developing new fields, the Japan Petroleum Exploration Co. (JAPEX; Sekiyu Shigen Kaihatsu K.K.). One of JAPEX’s main concerns was to import offshore oil technology.Footnote ⁵³ This concern also illustrates that several Asian governments eventually turned geophysical surveying, platform construction, and maintenance into parts of their national development plans. In Japan, the first platform was built in 1959, as will be discussed below, and in Singapore in 1969.Footnote ⁵⁴ This trend was later followed by further countries, such as China and South Korea during the 1980s. Several Asia-based companies thus eventually contributed to technological advances and reduced the importance of platform and equipment manufacturers located in the US Gulf of Mexico.

State-supported exploration projects and governmental appropriations of marine spaces since the mid-1950s show that Asian political elites now began to guide the succeeding wave of offshore fossil fuel development projects. While oil fields located on land directly next to bodies of water had once been indicators of possible fields offshore, US technology enabled exploration of far larger and also more distant marine spaces, resulting in the acceleration that characterized the oceanic Anthropocene. In terms of relational space, aquatic transportation of imported equipment and export of oil to markets, such as Japan, remained a facilitator compared to yet unconnected parts of terrestrial Asia. The Japanese government thus not only focused on Japan’s waters but also became the main importer and a major financer of projects in other parts of Asia. Simultaneously, the accessibility of marine spaces by offshore oil industry vessels, including platforms towed over very large distances, meant that, in contrast to terrestrial development projects, the agency of Asian political elites was hardly reduced by physical infrastructure-related structural choice limitations going back to decisions made during colonial rule. I emphasize this point of state-led offshore fossil fuel developmentalisms and military-related energy security fears by contrasting the governmental agendas and marine space appropriations after decolonization with the earlier projects. The aforementioned earlier offshore drilling had taken place since the late nineteenth century within the already claimed territorial waters of Japan and Brunei (or in a Burmese river). The Japanese government now provided funding to fully explore the archipelago’s territorial waters. Moreover, what also emerged during the 1950s and 1960s was state-led, large-scale marine space appropriation that stretched from the continental shelf of the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea and further north. After all, in terms of legal frameworks, structural choice limitations did not inhibit this development. The spatial appropriation and the new legal regimes that Asian political elites could create thus emphasize their agency vis-à-vis oil companies, whether private or public.

Starting with the task of importing technology, JAPEX purchased a jack-up rig design, which had been developed for use in the US Gulf of Mexico. In contrast to the fixed platform off Brunei, the jack-up rig, ‘Hakuryūgō,’ had evolved from submersible drilling barges that had been designed to operate in Louisiana’s bayous. ‘Hakuryūgō’ was able to float while being towed to its destination, where its legs would be submerged to stabilize it by penetrating the seabed. The mobile design enabled it to do exploratory drilling at various locations, which underlines the limited physical infrastructure needs for the large-scale project. The Japanese government in the process subsidized JAPEX’s increase in offshore exploration capability, a consequence of the aforementioned oil scarcity problems caused by limited Japanese capabilities before and during WWII. Simultaneously, the decision was a reminder of global maritime connections, since alternatively a platform could have been towed from the US Gulf Coast to Japan. After construction by a Japanese heavy industry company, ‘Hakuryūgō’ began its work off Akita Prefecture in April 1959.Footnote ⁵⁵ In November, the platform discovered what would be named the Tsuchizaki offshore oil field, located off Michikawa and very close to Akita City, followed by more discoveries nearby during the following months.Footnote ⁵⁶

Japanese offshore oil fields were marginal in size compared to those found in major oil regions, but an almost simultaneous, Japanese government-supported project discovered a huge offshore field and accelerated the energy transition in the waters of the Persian Gulf. In the postwar period, the Persian Gulf and its coastal areas became the most important oil region—and here again the presence of terrestrial oil fields made discoveries offshore likely. In 1951, US oil company ARAMCO (Arabian-American Oil Co.) found an offshore oil field off Saudi Arabia, the first to be confirmed in the comparatively shallow waters of the Gulf.Footnote ⁵⁷ The event attracted the attention of Japanese political and economic elites, among them businessman Yamashita Tarō, who had very good contacts to Kishi Nobusuke’s cabinet. During the early economic high-growth period, Yamashita developed a plan to produce and sell offshore oil from the Persian Gulf to Japanese customers, since hardly any other oil concessions were globally available.Footnote ⁵⁸ After long negotiations between February 1957 and July 1958, Yamashita’s newly founded Arabian Oil Co. (Arabia Sekiyu K.K.) gained a newly created offshore concession in the waters off the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait Neutral Zone.Footnote ⁵⁹ Using jack-up rigs built in the US Gulf of Mexico and towed across the ocean, the very substantial Khafji oil field was discovered in January 1960. Before that, an explosion in July 1959 had not only largely destroyed a platform but also indicated the presence of the oil field, after which the Kishi government provided huge amounts of funding: USD 42 million before the end of the year, while Minister of International Trade and Industry Ikeda Hayato (in 1960 becoming prime minister) proposed another loan of USD 175 million for Arabian Oil’s future development of the field.Footnote ⁶⁰ Several years later, in 1966, the company’s offshore wells contributed a very noteworthy 14% to Japan’s oil imports.Footnote ⁶¹

In terms of the growing agency of West Asian or Middle Eastern political elites, Saudi finance minister Mohammed Suroor Sabban, oil director Abdullah Tariki, and their Kuwaiti colleagues were able to receive substantially better conditions from Yamashita’s company than Western major oil companies had previously offered them. Publicly gaining greater leverage in negotiating conditions—here concerning a newly created concession made possible by the appropriation of marine space in the first place—supported the governments in their endeavours to decolonize their oil industries.Footnote ⁶² Such decolonization also resulted in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait becoming two founding members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 and culminated in the drastic oil price increase of 1973. Moreover, the Saudi and Kuwaiti negotiations with Arabian Oil Co. and the company’s discovery success encouraged other Asian governments to appropriate marine spaces beyond their territorial waters by proclaiming legal control over the continental shelf and its oil resources. Such claims accelerated globally after WWII in reaction to the US Truman administration’s claim in 1945 over continental shelf resources and culminated in the United Nations Convention on the Continental Shelf (1958, entering into force in 1964), through which signatory governments granted each other legal control over offshore oil exploitation wherever technology could reach it. The convention and its successors therefore created a new legal framework that granted Asian and other governments control over marine spaces that then ushered in the oceanic Anthropocene.Footnote ⁶³

In Japan’s case, while the agency of capitalists like Yamashita is no way negated, the support from Japanese diplomats and governmental funding was highly important. After all, Japan in 1945 had lost its colonial empire and the Allied occupation’s initial demilitarization and deindustrialization project disrupted access to oil concessions, meaning that the country possessed only marginal oil fields in its remaining territory. Moreover, the oil embargo of summer 1941 had long-lasting consequences in terms of energy security fears among Japanese political elites, in many cases people who had already been active before and during the war (among them Kishi, who during wartime had led the ministries of munitions and commerce). Their fears, strengthened when the Suez Crisis (1956) had delayed oil deliveries to Europe, increased their willingness to support projects that diversified supply regions or granted Japanese companies control over production and export of oil to Japan. During the 1960s, the rapidly growing oil requirements of the high-growth economy further increased these fears.Footnote ⁶⁴ Together, energy security fears and demand for oil prompted Japanese political elites—as well as their Saudi and Kuwaiti counterparts—to create the developmentalist framework within which Arabian Oil Co. operated.

Asia’s terrestrial and oceanic energy transitions synchronizing in the Anthropocene

The offshore focus of Asian political elites meant that Asia’s terrestrial and oceanic energy transitions began to synchronize, gradually moving the temporality of Asian marine spaces into the fossil fuel economy associated with the Anthropocene epoch that transformed local Asian energy regimes, albeit at different speeds. Driven by the Japanese high-growth economy’s exploding demand for oil, energy security fears, and their respective own fossil fuel development projects, the newly independent governments in Southeast and East Asia began to appropriate marine spaces and to create legal regimes for offshore oil exploration.

In their attempt to discover possible offshore oil fields, political elites in independent Indonesia faced a situation not genuinely different from wartime Japan. Terrestrial oil wells had been commercially exploited since the 1880s, but their locations and geographical conditions had not resulted in any offshore drilling, neither during Dutch colonialism nor during the Japanese occupation. After the end of the independence war (1945–1949), with the intention to decolonize Indonesia’s economy, the parliament passed a motion in 1951 that prohibited the granting of further concessions until a new oil law was created. In 1960, this new law permitted transnational oil companies to operate only as contractors of national oil companies. However, during the last years of Sukarno’s rule, Indonesia’s first president from 1945 to 1967, transnational oil companies increasingly saw their earnings dwindle and feared nationalization. The left-leaning government’s economic development policies contributed to massive inflation and also enforced domestic oil sales at a very low price with the intention of democratizing consumption.Footnote ⁶⁵ Access to the global offshore oil exploration network was thus inhibited first by the government not offering concessions and from 1960 by the strong reluctance of transnational oil companies to invest capital and provide technology. In 1964, negotiations regarding an offshore concession began, which nevertheless dragged on until Sukarno lost his influence after October 1965. The political elite of the new Suharto regime then saw offshore oil concessions as a way to increase tax revenues and reduce the rapid inflation. Ibnu Sutowo, a military officer who served as head of the national oil company Permina (in 1968 merging into Pertamina) and from 1966 as minister of mines, encouraged the involvement of transnational oil companies through production sharing agreements between them and Pertamina. The result was that marine spaces from north Sumatra to east Kalimantan were turned into concessions and experienced an exploration rush by Japanese, US, Australian, Canadian, and European oil companies. In October 1970, the first offshore production platform was dedicated.Footnote ⁶⁶ The comparatively short distance across the ocean to the Japanese market meant that the majority of oil was exported there. Altogether, the trajectory emphasizes the significance of the laws and legal framework created by Indonesian political elites.

The creation of the Committee for Co-ordination of Joint Prospecting for Mineral Resources in Asian Offshore Areas (CCOP) illustrates the importance of offshore oil in the context of implementing inter-governmental development projects. In that sense, offshore oil exploration and production became an item on the political and economic agendas of global organizations, such as the UN, and their regional suborganizations. In November 1965, an expert group of the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) decided to set into motion a first surveying project. In 1966, they created the CCOP and gained assistance from several Western governments. Its delegates represented Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, the three non-communist countries geographically (and in terms of transport distance) closest to Japan, who had gained their independence after WWII. By 1974, South Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore had joined this group of Asian countries bordering the West Pacific Ocean.Footnote ⁶⁷ The countries located around the Indian Ocean—where most offshore fields were located in inaccessibly deep water, with the exception of the Persian Gulf, a few fields off India (such as Bombay High off Mumbai, discovered in 1965), and the most western part of Indonesian waters—planned to form another group, which never happened.Footnote ⁶⁸

Some of the long-term results of the CCOP’s first survey project are very well-known globally, involving the world’s most notorious maritime boundaries conflicts. Toward the end of the UN’s first global ‘Decade of Development’, a group of surveyors from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States surveyed the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea between October and November 1968. What follows is the strongest illustration of Asian governments’ predominant position in the oceanic Anthropocene, exemplified by them claiming control over offshore oil production and denying it to each other and corporate capitalists. The doubtlessly most important sentence in the survey report, published in 1969, reads as follows: ‘A high probability exists that the [East China Sea’s] continental shelf between Taiwan and Japan may be one of the most prolific oil reservoirs in the world’.Footnote ⁶⁹ A couple of sentences later, readers learned about the lower, but still substantial, economic potential of the Yellow Sea: ‘A second favourable area for oil and gas is beneath the Yellow Sea where three broad basins are present.’Footnote ⁷⁰ In the case of the East China Sea, the survey was the main reason for the emergence of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands conflict between the governments of Japan, Taiwan, and China, still festering to this day and threatening global security. After all, due to the large-scale appropriation of marine space that was underway, control over these islands would define legal control over the surrounding continental shelf far beyond territorial waters, including some of the hoped-for fossil fuel fields. The administration of US President Richard Nixon was unwilling to get involved in the conflict. In 1970, it informed US companies operating in Taiwanese concessions, disputed by Mao Zedong’s government, that their vessels could not expect US naval protection. For US companies, the conflict between Chinese and Taiwanese political elites thus caused their withdrawal. Analytically, in terms of the parties dominating the conflict, this withdrawal emphasized that the US companies had very limited agency. Territorial disputes between Chinese and Taiwanese political elites with their Japanese counterparts also regularly re-emerged during the following decades.Footnote ⁷¹

In the Yellow Sea, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee government immediately began to award concessions. However, over the course of the following years, the Chinese government emphasized China’s conflicting boundary claims through sabotage and military threats. Mao’s administration also proved unwilling to participate in negotiations. The South Korean government, like many others, founded a national oil company, the Korea National Oil Corporation (Hanguk Seogyu Gongsa), and eventually shifted focus and operations to undisputed marine spaces.Footnote ⁷² Even though not a result of the CCOP report, the ongoing South China Sea conflict, largely sparked by offshore oil exploration and constituting another threat to global security, should also be mentioned here among these maritime boundaries conflicts.Footnote ⁷³ Altogether, corporate capitalism was definitely no guiding force during this transition of parts of the South China Sea, East China Sea, and Yellow Sea into the oceanic Anthropocene and Asia’s corresponding climate change narrative.

In the case of China, similar to many other Asian countries, field locations and their physical geographies had not encouraged an early political interest in offshore oil. When US technology enabled the exploration of the Gulf of Mexico’s bays in the late 1930s, the war against Japan (which controlled the coastline) and later the Cold War tensions with the United States had inhibited the changing Chinese governments from engaging in an exploration programme. Another major problem of physical geography was related to the USSR, China’s main ally after the communist victory in the Civil War in 1949. Starting the same year, the Soviet oil industry began to develop massive production infrastructure off Baku in the nontidal waters of the Caspian Sea. The large oil fields discovered after WWII in the Volga Basin and in West Siberia nevertheless meant that research attention was given to swampy or permafrost regions and not to developing platforms and equipment for exploration in rougher, open marine waters. Moreover, Western export restrictions to the USSR and China constituted another political factor in facilitating and inhibiting the global expansion of offshore oil drilling. From 1948, Western companies were only allowed to sell such technology if permitted by their governments, which usually was not the case due to oil being a strategic resource in the global Cold War.Footnote ⁷⁴ Chinese political elites were thus unable to obtain any open marine waters technologies from the USSR before relations between the two countries strongly deteriorated in the 1960s, Soviet technicians were withdrawn, and Chinese self-reliance advocacy intensified. Only during the early 1970s did the Mao government begin its own state-controlled exploration activities. The initial focus was primarily on the Bohai Sea, realized through the purchase of offshore oil technology during a time of rapprochement with the United States and Japan. By the late 1970s, further reopening of the country also resulted in joint venture agreements with transnational companies.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, in China’s case, as in almost all other parts of Asia, it was strong state control and governmental economic planning, and not freely acting corporate capitalists, that steered the marine spaces’ energy transition into the oceanic Anthropocene.