From the Introduction

At one time, humans cloaked their lives in the flesh of trees. Babies cried in their wooden cribs under wooden roofs while wood fires burned.

After the forests died, we threw sooty black coals onto the life-sustaining fires that kept us warm and cooked our food. In oil, though, we had encountered a more powerful and seemingly plentiful accumulation of energy than any other then known; an energy-hungry species, once we found it, we consumed it in great mouthfuls, barely coming up for breath…

Within a century of drilling the first oil well in 1859, crude oil and the products and machines it makes possible had seeped into virtually every crevice of Western society. Today, oil and its progeny makes cars run, planes fly, houses warm and lit, hospitals sterile, and supermarkets stocked with fruit and vegetables. Strapped into steely, oil-fed motors, soft, breakable human bodies gloriously extend their reach and power. Newborn babies slide from their mothers into gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters. The few metal and wood products that remain today are extracted by oil-powered machines traveling on oil-covered roads. They arrive packaged in oil-made plastics.

One-sixth of the entire global economy is dedicated to the staggering effort of harvesting oil from its uneven accumulations within the earth’s crust. Yet while oil drenches Western societies—Americans alone gorge on no less than there gallons every day—the average Asian or African receives few of the benefits of the planet’s crude.

As the lush accumulations of the planet’s crude diminish, oil companies enlist the best minds of scholars and the blood of soldiers to fortify their sprawling tangle of arteries pumping oil to the world’s machines. Up in the air, the century’s explosion of carbon from the planet’s crust hangs over us, ominously. Still most oil companies are convinced they are doing the right thing.

“Everyone at this company works for the general good,” avows ExxonMobil’s Lee Raymond. “And I’m the general of that general good.”

Others feel differently. Oil is “the excrement of the devil,” spat OPEC co-founder Juan Pérez Alfonzo.

……….

From Crude: The Story of Oil. Table 1.Where is the world’s oil and how much is left?

The world’s biggest proven reserves of oil, how much has been pumped out already; the year when oil production will peak and then decline