The Weird Invisibility of Oil

Considering how central oil is to our daily lives, it’s easy to forget that most of us rarely see actual oil. Maybe on a paper towel if you check your oil before a long road trip or in the rainbow sheen on the water surface by a boat launch. Our engine oil is dealt with by mechanics who dispose of it for a fee. We hardly ever see the gasoline (an oil derivative) that goes into our cars since it goes from the pump to our tanks; if it sees the light of day, it’s because we’ve been clumsy. Even before we get to the gas station, gasoline is pumped from tanker trucks into the ground tanks below. Unless your job regularly requires it, if you’re looking directly at oil or gasoline, it usually means that something has gone very wrong.

Crude oil is tangible but still mostly invisible. Whenever I do see actual oil, it’s usually in an emotionally-charged Dawn commercial where an oil soaked bird is getting a bubble bath–and those commercials always present an unspecified oil spill disconnected from any real time or space.

Living with oil’s invisible but tangible existence is living in the shadow of something enormous that you can rarely see directly. In these shadows are forty million miles of roads that stretch across the world, and the roughly three thousand tons of infrastructure that exist for every person on the planet. These shadows look like a traffic jam, miles and miles of cars moving slowly across a paved highway. These shadows look like over 200 petrochemical plants across Louisiana alone, which makes oil more visible here–even while it stays mostly invisible. (Again, the moments when we can see oil here, something has gone terribly wrong.)

These shadows are also the 50,000 miles of pipelines in Louisiana, the 730,000 miles around the world. They are the always-growing barrage of plastic grocery bags under a bathroom sink and all the other plastic clutter that is a part of our daily lives because plastic is a petrochemical, too. These shadows are the cosmology of microplastics distributed across the world. They are the growing mountain ranges of discarded fast-fashion that litter the Global South–the heaps of synthetic fibers that most of us never see even though they are big enough to be seen from space.

These shadows mean that we are constantly but also never looking at oil. Being in the shadow of something enormous while hardly ever seeing that actual thing makes it harder to think around it. How do we imagine our lives without something we never see directly but are always looking at? 

Oil has touched everything on the planet in some way yet most of us will never touch oil directly. But in other ways, we are touching it constantly. There are petrochemicals in the devices we’re using, the clothes that we’re wearing, the furniture we’re sitting on, and even in the blood moving through our veins.

On the few occasions I’ve seen oil in its viscous, unrefined form, I get the uncanny sense that I’m looking at something I shouldn’t be able to see, like someone’s insides made it to the outside, and it’s all too intimate and sticky to handle.

Oil is invisible because it makes us uncomfortable. It’s invisible because we want it to be. 

Ecophilosopher Timothy Morton describes oil as “the result of some dark, secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil, you’re looking at the past.” Looking at oil means contemplating the enormity of time–and maybe that’s one reason we want to keep it invisible. Or maybe it’s because deep down we know that we never should have touched it in the first place.