Green petroculture: Insights from the oil corporation Preem’s tall oil strategy
研究了瑞典石油公司Preem如何通过妥尔油战略塑造一种名为“绿色石油文化”的不可持续阶段，揭示其掩盖全球生态影响、阻碍真正转型的机制。
• Petroculture as cultural assumptions encouraged by access to fossil fuels. • Causal thematic analysis of oil corporation Preem’s sustainability reports. • Preem’s “sustainable” tall oil strategy as shaped by petroculture. • Articulates green petroculture as an emergent unsustainable phase. • Green petroculture obfuscates global social-ecological impacts. The petroculture literature shows how fossil fuels have profoundly shaped modern cultures. This study introduces the concept of green petroculture to describe a cultural phase in which environmentally motivated solutions remain rooted in petrocultural ways of thinking and acting. Analysing the Swedish oil corporation Preem’s tall oil production, we examine how corporate sustainability strategies sustain this phase. Through a causal thematic analysis of eleven sustainability reports, the study identifies the mechanisms through which green petrocultures may emerge. These include environmental statism, alienation from nature, greenwashing, denial, reductionism, and environmental load displacement. These mechanisms interact to sustain surface-level sustainability responses that displace the environmental burdens of low-carbon energy systems elsewhere. In Preem’s case, the company promotes tall oil as a climate solution while obscuring the global environmental impacts of land requirements equivalent to three times the surface area of Sweden. The study highlights the importance of understanding green petroculture as a cultural phase with global environmental implications and offers insights into how societies might move beyond it toward genuine ecological and social transformation.