“Fog Sirens of the North Sea: Exploring the Offshore Industry and its Legacy”

Two short blasts and one long, the letter ‘U’ in Morse code, this is how the fog siren of a North Sea gas or oil platform sounds, loud and piercing, intended to drown out wind and waves from miles away. And that’s how the video starts by which Tanja Engelberts Forgotten Seas announces, her photo project and book of the same name about the offshore industry in the North Sea.

Stay away from me, the siren calls, one of the most ghastly sounds you can hear at sea, like a giant animal dying. In a sense it is. Since the discovery of gas and oil under the continental shelf enclosed by Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the North Sea has been regarded as the last frontier. America went to the Moon, Europe to the North Sea. The salty wilderness was opened up with technological stunt work under the most difficult conditions.

But the fossil fuel bonanza is over, even though there is new technology to make quasi-depleted fields profitable again, even though the war in Ukraine has pushed up prices and even though platforms can also be used for new purposes, such as hydrogen production or CO2 storage. deployed. Although there are still some 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves, the North Sea basin is inevitably empty. The oldest of the 500 installations, such as the Brent platforms that gave North Sea oil its name, are being dismantled.