In this article, I seek to trace the contours of a moral economy of oil resources. To do so, I mobilize the results of a field study conducted among employees and managers of a transnational firm involved in offshore oil extraction. I demonstrate that the emotions, values and norms that they continually articulate in their work activities within the company bear in them the tensions and contradictions of the extractive complex, which material deployment is constrained by the specific features of oil resources (burial in the subsoil, location in the open sea). At last, I insist on the fact that, in order to be properly problematized, these particular moral economies must be set against the "ordinary" moral economy of the oil resource that is elaborated on the scale of industrial society as a whole – and which legitimacy is increasingly contested.