Resilience is a term often applied to the oil and gas industry, which continue to extract fossil fuels at an increasing rate despite the ongoing disruptions of ecological damage and climate change. The focus on extractivist resilience discourses should be extended to literary narratives, since these have been considered complicit in the systems of extraction-based growth (what I call here “petromodernity”) that have obscured and continue to obscure the environmental cost of fossil fuels. In this chapter, I explore the literary functions of a particular place in the North Sea—Doggerland—that allows for a rich imagination of both extractivist resilience and vulnerability. Using the example of Élisabeth Filhol’s novel Doggerland (2019), I argue that the fictionalised oil encounter is able to reflect on the role of literature in petromodernity, recognizing the paradox of contemporary literary practice as both inseparable from petromodern resilience, and able to offer a critical perspective on it.