If history is seen as a sequence of progressively more remarkable energy conversions then oil, or more accurately a range of liquids produced from it, has earned an incomparable place in human evolution. Conversions of these liquids in internal combustion engines have expanded human horizons through new, and more affordable, means of personal and mass transportation. Anybody with a car in a country with decent highways can travel more than 1,000km in the course of one day (in Europe this could easily entail driving across four countries). Any city with a runway long enough to accommodate large jets can now be reached from any other city on the Earth in less than twenty hours of flying time, and for many people trips to Bali or Mauritius have become nearly as common as those to Birmingham or Munich. Liquid fuels have created new landscapes of concrete and asphalt highways, overpasses, parking lots, shopping megacenters and seemingly endless urban sprawl.
Private cars also allow for unprecedented quotidian personal mobility. They make it easy to buy imported foodstuffs in a store at the other end of a town or to drive, on the spur of the moment, to a restaurant, symphony concert or a football game. They make it possible to live far away from a place of work, to set one’s own schedule during vacation drives, to spend free time far from home fishing or inside a garage installing monster engines and wheels or minutely reconstructing vintage car models.
Liquid fuels, through the combination of fast and massive container ships and eighteen-wheeler trucks, have brought us Chilean apricots and South African grapes in January and ginger or green beans from China or Kenya all year round. Liquid fuels have also helped to rationalize productive processes ranging from farming to retailing, changes that include such remarkable organizational feats as the just-in-time delivery of goods (where large assembly plants carry no extensive and expensive inventories and receive their parts by truck and train just when needed) and such profound macroeconomic changes as the globalization of manufacturing, where everything seems to be made (or assembled) many time zones away.
Modern life now begins and ends amidst the plethora of plastics whose synthesis began with feedstocks derived from oil – because hospitals teem with them. Surgical gloves, flexible tubing, catheters, IV containers, sterile packaging, trays, basins, bed pans and rails, thermal blankets and lab ware: naturally, you are not aware of these surroundings when a few hours or a few days old, but most of us will become all too painfully aware of them six, seven or eight decades later. And that recital was limited only to common hospital items made of polyvinylchloride; countless other items fashioned from a huge variety of plastics are in our cars, aeroplanes, trains, homes, offices and factories.
But if the new oil-derived world has been quasi-miraculous, enchanting and full of unprecedented opportunities, it has been also one of dubious deals, nasty power plays, protracted violence, economic inequalities and environmental destruction. Ever since its beginnings, the high stakes of the oil business have attracted shady business deals (from J. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s ill-starred Yukos) and begat some questionable alliances (be it the US and Saudi Arabia or China and Sudan). Oil ownership and the riches it provides have empowered dictators (from Muammar al-Gaddāfī to Saddām Hussein), emboldened autocrats (Vladimir Putin and the late Hugo Chavez being among the prominent examples), financed terrorists (including the murderous activities of al-qā’ida and dā’ish, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), encouraged massive corruption (be it in Nigeria or Indonesia, Russia or Malaysia), promoted ostentatiously excessive consumption (practiced by the legions of Saudi princes as well as by new Russian oligarchs), engendered enormous income inequalities and done little for personal freedoms and the status of women.
Many (perhaps too many) books about oil have looked at these economic, social and political linkages. I will begin by briefly examining oil in these contexts before going on to explore the innumerable quotidian tasks of discovering, producing, transporting, refining and marketing the requisite volume of oil, a mass that now amounts to well over 4 billion tonnes a year. Once appreciated, these actions are no less fascinating than the world of political oil intrigues, and only their cumulatively immense ingenuity has made crude oil the single most important source of primary energy in our world.