Petrocapitalism on the Interior Frontier: A Vertical Counter-Atlas of the Bakken Operational Landscape

Between 2008 and 2014, North Dakota’s field production of crude oil increased sixfold. This rapid metabolic intensification, the Bakken oil boom, transformed landscapes across the Northern Great Plains, mobilizing immense sums of capital to construct thousands of new oil wells, access roads, and logistics facilities. Planetary urbanization theorists have demonstrated that the extension of extractive zones is a precondition to urban capital accumulation, suggesting that the Bakken oil boom played a role in global urbanization dynamics. Still, within planetary urbanization theory, there is a lack of geospatial analysis on the violent transformations of particular resource frontiers. This thesis contributes to planetary urbanization theory by producing an atlas of the Bakken operational landscape, drawing on the framework of critical physical geography to map the production of the Bakken as an extractive eco-social system. The atlas centers the Bakken’s local physical landscape, leveraging counter-mapping and critical remote sensing techniques to visualize the violent environmental transformations of an oil boom. The maps document environmental violence enacted upon the Bakken’s landscape throughout its vertical extent, mapping surface infrastructures like wellpads and roads, but also unveiling subterranean drilling infrastructure and atmospheric pollution invisible to the human eye. By tracing the dense web of infrastructures that made the Bakken into a productive hinterland, I identify the continued intensification and flexibility of petrocapitalism in the anthropocene, as well as the twenty-first century’s turn toward the North American interior as a petroleum hinterland. I contend that the churning contours of petrocapitalism may be better understood through the careful application of geospatial data at the regional scale, developing a set of cartographic methods to both theorize the contemporary relationship between petrocapitalism and the environment and compile evidence of environmental violence.