petroleum

Margonelli, Lisa (2007) Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline. New York, NY: Doubleday.

The back cover of this book said it was humorous. After the horror in the Gulf of Mexico lately, I was all for a funny book about oil. Margonelli is a journalist with the descriptive capacity of Barbara Kingsolver. This book is really the back-story about how gas gets into your car. It’s a story most of us are blissfully ignorant of and dangerously incurious about.

Margonelli traces the supply chain backward from the gas station (yes, a whole chapter on the strange microcosm of our society) to the distributors (who live a gamblers existence, betting 24 hours a day on fuel prices and trying to get tankers to the gas stations before they run out.)

She goes to a refinery, but before she is let in, she gets training on all the safety warning signals, which ironically go off while she is there. She visits a drilling rig in Texas to discover people with nicknames like Midget, Worm and Lost & Found in a carefully orchestrated ballet, taking pipe in and out of the ground, fascinated with ancient geologic formations and the story they tell.

She is one of the rare individuals to get access to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve where she finds “Boy Scouts gone mad; they are always preparing to be prepared.” In her view the SPR is ineffective both for national security (it’s in the same Gulf area that likely will be hit by the same storms) and price control (where just the mere mention of increasing reserves sends panic waves through the markets.

Then she visits the trading floor, the NYMEX oil market with crude women and men in garish coats and ‘otter haircuts’ (you know, the slicked back wet look) who go berserk in the ‘crude pit’ where oil futures are traded.

And she visits where we get oil from: Venezuela, where the land around Maracaibo Lake is sinking as the oil is withdrawn, leaving the surrounding city with a dike to hold back the waters. She explores the odd dis-empowerment that comes with a petrostate and the forces encouraging them not to invest in improving their equipment.

She visits Chad and Iran and Nigeria where she uncovers the hidden costs of letting the oil companies manage our petro-diplomacy and the short-sighted missteps of our government, including in 1988  a nine-hour war the President Reagan unleashed on an oil platform to send a message to the Iran government but instead unleashing anger that is still harbored today.

She ends her world tour in China where she gets a nasty lung infection from the air pollution and meets people who feel they have got to have a car to be a respected part of society. While the central government is trying to radically improve fuel efficiency, they need the jobs a New Detroit could give them. They are investing heavily in new technologies (like the Aspire, part of the 863 Project) but at the same time, some cities like Guangzhou ‘have forbidden small cars from their streets on the grounds that they are beneath the dignity of a metropolis.

This book is sprinkled with factoids but is very readable. It provides important insights about this history and future of the petroleum industry and, not coincidentally, our future as well.