Christina Nadeau grew up in Stavanger’s petroculture. Her work explores how oil has shaped identities, communities, and the stories Norwegians tell about themselves.
She is currently writing a narrative non-fiction book that combines memoir, interviews, and research to examine Stavanger’s relationship with oil and what it means to navigate the energy transition from within a city built on petroleum.
Christina read this prologue "The Good Pirates" to her coming book at Petrogandafestivalen 2026.
Christina is a researcher and writer from Stavanger. She holds an MSc in Petroleum Geoscience, an MSc in Climate Change, and recently completed her PhD at the University of Oslo, where her research focused on climate tipping points, public understanding of climate change, and Norwegian attitudes towards the petroleum industry.
She is interested in how climate science is communicated, how societies respond to difficult knowledge, and how more honest conversations about the current and future impacts of climate change can help us imagine different futures.
The Good Pirates
by Christina Nadeau
My childhood began in a quiet neighbourhood at the foot of a small hill overlooking Gandsfjord, the ribbon of blue that joins Stavanger and Sandnes. If the weather was nice, which it often wasn’t on the west coast, my father and I would climb the hill to watch the ships returning from the North Sea.
At the top, the fjord opened into a long blue strip, with Dalsnuten rising behind it. My father was a geologist, and he would point towards the mountains and explain how they had formed, smoothed by the last ice age.
“Every pebble, every rock, every mountain tells a story,” he would tell me again and again.
Geology and Earth history became my childhood fairytales, alongside the more conventional ones about trolls, witches, and pirate ships. In fact, pirate ships were exactly what we were waiting for.
“Look, the pirates are here!” I’d shout, pointing at the oil rigs being towed in from the North Sea for repairs.
My father always found this amusing.
“Yes, they are pirates. But don’t worry, they’re the good pirates. They’re looking for black gold.”
“So, are you a pirate then?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I am, because I help look for the black gold.”
Our house was a ten-minute walk from Statoil’s headquarters at Forus. I don’t remember a time before I recognised the golden Statoil oil droplet. It was stamped high on the office building, above the petrol station where we bought ice cream on Sundays, and on the ID card hanging beside my father’s jacket in our hallway.
And I wanted to become one of the good pirates too. So much so that I made myself a Statoil badge to wear when my father took me into the empty offices on weekends to work. I explored the sea of desks and refuelled on sugar cubes left behind in meeting rooms.
I wanted to join the enormous treasure hunt my father had told me about. Rocks were stories, but they could also be maps. If you learned how to read them, they could lead you towards something buried millions of years ago.
Somewhere beneath the North Sea, X marked the spot.
When you grow up in Stavanger, oil and gas isn’t simply a natural resource. It is woven into the fabric of our lives.
Oil was the reason many of our parents came here. Families from Texas, Scotland, Indonesia, and elsewhere ended up raising their children on the west coast of Norway. The industry shaped our neighbourhoods, our friendships, our accents, our culture, and our ideas about what a successful future looked like.
But my relationship with the industry became more complicated as I grew older.
At school, we watched An Inconvenient Truth. Years later, during my master’s in petroleum geoscience, a lecturer told us that the environment wasn’t really the oil industry’s concern. It was something to acknowledge and tick off on a risk assessment form.
This happened only weeks after the Paris Agreement had been signed.
“It’s just not their business, that falls on the politicians” a friend’s father later explained to me. He had been an exploration manager at ConocoPhillips.
As I learned more about climate change, and how meaningful action had been delayed for decades, it became increasingly easy to turn the oil industry into the villain of the story. But the industry was also made up of people I knew, people who baked us brownies on Friday afternoons and drove us to the cinema to watch Twilight.
Last year, I returned to Stavanger to talk with people working in the industry about climate change and the energy transition.
“Thank goodness the green wave is over,” a friend who works at DNO told me. “Maybe now we can go back to being more realistic.”
But I thought addressing climate change was being realistic. What reality are we speaking of exactly?
Again and again, I encountered the same frustration: that people working on climate change and the environment didn’t understand the industry, the realities of energy demand, the market, or how important oil and gas is to this city.
But I do. I was there.
I was at the dinosaur exhibitions at the Oil Museum. I danced beneath a disco ball at a school dance in the ConocoPhillips canteen. I learned to swim with offshore survival training equipment suspended above the pool. I babysat for the head of BP and built rigs out of spaghetti at science events.
I studied the rocks. I learned how to find the treasure. But the treasure has a cost. My father was right about one thing. They were pirates, but whether they were good ones still seems to be up for debate, as the industry tries to ignore protesters at the ONS gates.
The industry pillaged in the name of the greater good, in the name of meeting demand, while taking something fundamental from current and future generations: a stable and liveable climate.
Stavanger has the oil industry etched into its surface, and sometimes it seems unable to imagine itself without it. It will take courage, they say, to face the transition. And perhaps they’re right. It does take courage to change a city built on oil. But I don’t think there is anything particularly brave about drowning in it.
To go down with the ship.
Until there is nothing left to take.
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You can watch the reading Christina did at Petrogandafestivalen 2026: Christina Nadeau - The Good Pirates (YouTube)
