OVERVIEW

This book is about the world s endowment of oil. It is a very important subject, considering that cheap oil-based energy has been the lifeblood of the world s economy over the best part of this century. Its influence has been enormous: it has driven the way people live; what they expect; how they order their lives. It is an intensely political subject, and it is a romantic story: black gold has turned many rags to riches, for individuals and for nations. It has spawned jealousies and arrogance, and has been a key factor in several wars: the Gulf War being the most recent. The great American economic miracle, with its mindless consumerism, owes much to its endowment of oil: the country would have been much less of a world power without it. Yet, American production peaked in 1971 ^[1], and is now in terminal decline.

Yes, it peaked in 1971. No one much noticed at the time: there was still plenty of gasoline at the filling station. But it was a critical and fundamental inflexion: a discontinuity. Before you can produce oil, you have to find it, and the 1971 peak in production in fact reflected an earlier peak in discovery that also went un-noticed. We can now look back and see the importance of these events: they marked the beginning of the end. Oil will not last forever. It was formed only rarely in the long geological history of the Earth, and only in a few places under...