My intention in the opening of this book is to bring the emerging field of petrocultures and energy humanities discourse in conversation with the field of animal studies. Melissa Hayes’ question of the absent nature of animals from energy history is a query that runs throughout this book, questioning what nonhuman narratives of energy there are and how such non-anthropocentric perspectives invite alternative energy futures from our fossil fuel driven past and present. Much of petrocultures as a cultural form of analysis is concerned with an issue of sight, how crude oil and energy is imagined and rendered in our everyday social and cultural lives when production zones and crude oil’s devastating effects are often located in peripheralised and offshore spaces, away from consumer centres and populated regions. Likewise, the products of meat and animal exploitation are often removed from view sequestered in rural peripheries away from common sight and physical encounters. This abstract and material erasure will form the basis of the dialogue I hope to engender between these two fields of study. Using Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a focal point for this introduction to demonstrate how the marine resource, the hunt for sperm whale blubber energy, illuminates the coalescence of both animal studies and energy culture. Using this canonical novel as a starting point to perceive animal studies and petrocultures in convergence, the introduction engenders to magnify the presence of the nonhuman animal in zones of extraction and narratives of energy. In placing these two fields in tandem, the argument I present is that a multispecies ethics, informed by affects, emotion and philosophical enquiry, can inform a new perspective in petroculture.