"Oil,Power and War : A Dark History" 

Author: Matthieu Auzanneau

Originally published: Nov. 30 2018

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Paperback: 672 pages

“The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases.”

If you want to understand the world you inhabit and the challenges it faces, it is difficult to overstate the importance of this book. Oil supplies the global economy with a plethora of essential raw materials, not just energy. Particularly since the beginning of the 20th century the evolution of industrial civilization has been driven by access to oil. But oil and other fossil fuels are one-time, finite resources created by evolutionary processes that began more than one billion years ago. Their finite nature has long been understood – and feared – by those who derive wealth or power from control of access to fossil fuels.

The random distribution of oil by geological processes essential to its creation is the root cause of the ‘oil wars’ that have plagued Western Civilization since the middle of the 20th century. Auzanneau provides a concise description of oil’s origins, derived from his conversations with Bernard Durand, former director of the geology-geochemistry division of the French Petroleum Institute. He devotes a large part of his book to the “dark history” of oil - “dark” not just in terms of wars and political corruption but also in terms of ‘unknown’ to those of us without a serious scholarly bent or ‘inside’ connections.

But perhaps the real strength and importance of this book is its exploration of the consequences of what has been called ‘peak oil’. Prior to the introduction of ‘fracking’ most people understood ‘peak oil’ to mean the end of access to oil. As Auzanneau notes, the world will never run out of oil. But it is running out of access to cheap oil, except – and maybe even including - those few locations endowed by random geological processes with most of the world’s remaining oil reserves. The consequences of ‘peak oil’ understood in this sense (i.e. running out of access to cheap oil) should be of concern to everyone, not just politicians and the oil industry.