Focusing on Gbekebor, a small rural community in Burutu Local Government Area in Delta State, this article examines the rise of small-scale artisanal oil refineries in the oil-rich Niger Delta area in south-eastern Nigeria. Mostly owned and run by unemployed youth in the Delta region, this informal underground oil economy is a classic example of the ways in which the mass of disgruntled youth in Nigeria have now evolved their own new survival strategies in the face of inauspicious social and economic conditions in everyday life. In the article, therefore, I argue that the growth of illegal refineries in the Niger Delta region represents ordinary people's desperate search for economic and social justice for themselves and their communities when the state and superordinate economic regimes (oil corporations) operating in the Delta area have connived to deny ordinary people their social and economic rights as citizens.