Crude: The Story of Oil

by Sonia Shah

Crude is the unexpurgated story of oil, from the circumstances of its birth millions of years ago to the spectacle of its rise as the indispensable ingredient of modern life. In addition to fueling our SUVs and illuminating our cities, crude oil and its byproducts fertilize our produce, pave our roads, and make plastic possible. "Newborn babies," observes author Sonia Shah, "slide from their mothers into petro-plastic-gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and are hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters." The modern world is drenched in oil; Crude tells how it came to be. A great human drama emerges, of discovery and innovation, risk, the promise of riches, and the power of greed.
Shah infuses recent twists in the story with equal drama, through chronicles of colorful modern-day characters — from the hundreds of Nigerian women who stormed a Chevron plant to a monomaniacal scientist for whom life is the pursuit of this earthblood and its elusive secret. Shah moves masterfully between scientific, economic, political, and social analysis, capturing the many sides of the indispensable mineral that we someday may have to find a way to live without.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Economics, Science, Environment

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and elsewhere. Her work has been featured on RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people around the world. Her 2010 book, The Fever, which was called a “tour-de-force history of malaria” (New York Times), “rollicking” (Time), and “brilliant” (Wall Street Journal) was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, is forthcoming from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February 2016.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black gold, Texas tea, yes, it is estimated that 15% of a human American is obstreperous, purposeful ignorance, the other 85% is made of crude oil, the subject of this fascinating study: a black, gunky substance that we covet more than our own world.
Shah is succinct and straightforward, so there's little political snark here. She gives you the science, the geology, the mechanism of extraction and refining, and all that other shit you need to know to argue with the guy down the hill who has the unnecessary giant exhaust pipe on his unnecessary monster truck. The science aside, the economic, technological, and especially political ramifications of oil consume most of the book. Environmental effects of course, form the backbone, but the cost for humanity is thankfully covered here, too, for example the decimation of Nigerian lives, the wars fought by proxy by oil companies, the willfully blind acceptance of almost psychotically exaggerated estimates of how much oil is actually left, and the grievous extents to which oil companies, read: governments, will go to keep this increasingly unfeasible form of energy alive. All common sense if you have the basic facts, but as we all know, arguments are won by force, not facts.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fine book about crude oil and big oil. Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. To my surprise this was very far from being the one of the ten biggest oil spills http://www.popularmechanics.com/scien...? A good companion book to Peter Maas's Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil published about the same time. Shah's book is more about oil biology, geology, ecology, recovery methods (good insights on deep water drilling and the Ocean Ranger catastrophe of 1982) than Maas's and less about despots up close and personal. Try to read both books.
I never knew oil came from macroscopic invertebrates; always thought it was plants.
Some wonderful writing e.g. p. 147 describing the Alberta tar sands " over millions of years a giant oilfield arose from its grave . Freed from its rocky tomb, the oilfield's light molecules of oil and gas evaporated, leaving behind a thick tarry sludge to bask in the thin northern sun. The sludge gummed up with the Albertan sand."
Neither book pretends to tell the panacea we need for climate change and oil hegemony . Both books present the moral imperative to decrease fossil fuel use for both climatic and humanitarian health and welfare reasons.

[Marya S · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and elegantly written account of the formation of the birth of oil in its most basic molecular structure all the way to its domination of global markets and geopolitics. This is not a polemic and for that I find it particularly refreshing. I especially enjoyed the accounts of how OPEC and the Iranian Islamic revolution destabilised the American economy in the 1970s. Reading about the activism in Nigeria and the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa was particularly heartbreaking.

Yes, the book is outdated now but I don't think that a piece of writing can be faulted purely because it was written in the past. It was also quite interesting to see how the predictions mentioned held up over the decades since it was written. If anything, this has definitely inspired further reading. Strongly recommend this for anyone with even a passing interest in how oil has shaped our lives and in the complicated, sometimes violent, journey taken to reach this point.

[Stephen Curran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book started of well, but then got all environmental and big bad nasty oil. Truth I find is always in-between

[Stephanie Weisgerber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Well researched. Eye opening. This independent journalist digs deep to unearth the facts and stats behind the world’s dwindling oil supply and what it means for us moving forward. Definitely a must read for us all.

[Micaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Utile introduzione al tema, ricerca documentata e sintetica anche se datata. Sono stati però del tutto omessi gli esempi controcorrente di politiche energetiche, e ce ne sono: il Costa Rica, che avrebbe potuto estrarre petrolio e gas in gran quantità, invece di lasciare campo libero alle trivelle si alimenta per il 92% con energia idroelettrica ed aspira ad essere un Paese totalmente ecosostenibile. La Danimarca ha presentato un piano energetico per il decennio 2020-2030 che punta alla completa decarbonizzazione, all'utilizzo di fonti energetiche rinnovabili e alla realizzazione di un parco eolico offshore da installare a 50 km dalle coste che coprirebbe il fabbisogno delle sette principali città. Dal 2005, crescita della popolazione e del PIL sono andate di pari passo con la riduzione delle emissioni nocive del 31%, anche grazie alla convinta cooperazione dei cittadini danesi. Chiunque sia stato a Copenaghen ha avuto modo di contare le macchine che si vedono in circolazione: sono meno delle biciclette; la previsione di Sonia Shah dell'inevitabile incremento esponenziale del numero di automobili circolanti e di una società sempre più dipendente dagli idrocarburi potrebbe quindi essere smentita dai fatti. Ripensare le basi della nostra economia e le nostre abitudini é complesso, necessario ma é anche possibile: lo dimostra il cambio di passo della stessa Arabia Saudita con colossali investimenti sull'energia solare. Il ritiro dall'Accordo di Parigi appena annunciato dagli Usa non sarà in vigore prima di un anno, ed é controbilanciato dall'impegno irrevocabile di Cina e Francia; il movimento planetario Fridays for Future sta risvegliando l'attivismo sui cambiamenti climatici e la richiesta di energia pulita. C'è ancora spazio per l'ottimismo

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

a both scientific and anthropological history of oil and its uses, the ways in which it has been a literal engine of progress in our world and the ways in which it has led to exploitation of vulnerable communities, led to violent war, and inches the planet toward total destruction. as a nonscientist looking for narrative, the most compelling parts to me were the human elements that focused on the ways that people in places like, for example, Nigeria, have dealt with corporate exploitation and poisoning of their land, or the Exxon Valdez spill. This book runs into the wall of an continuing history book though, which is that so much history has happened since its release that it becomes less relevant with each passing year, so it should perhaps exist as a living document - one housed on a website with chapter updates every year or so. I don't know. I'm an idiot. don't listen to me.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched. Structure of information is well laid out. Author's bias is clear but it may be accurate. Thought provoking. My innocence regarding oil and how it drives decisions and access to information has been shattered.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though I live in Alberta and work at a university with deep ties to the petroleum industry, I knew surprisingly little about the history of oil. While this book is now a little dated (Alberta oil sands had not yet begun to really boom when it was published in 2004, and they only get a brief description), much of it is still highly relevant to our current situation, particularly in helping the reader understand the urgency of accelerating the transition to greener forms of energy.

[Candice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative, needs to be updated.

[Jonas Gehrlein · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book gives an overview of the history of oil and how we may need to use other resources.
The best parts are those about offshore working conditions and effects of oil on Geological research

[Seth D Michaels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great until it goes extremely wrong.

Most of the way through, this book is quite good - a well-explained, brief-but-detailed summary of the history, science and economics behind oil and the problems our reliance on it can cause, with an obvious but not obtrusive left-wing analytical lens. However, it was written in 2004, and as such it is badly dated - missing major events later on that expand, complicate or change the story Shah is telling. Chapter 9, in particular, is premised on the concept of "peak oil" - the idea that we're running up against the limits of the reserves available and our production of oil is going to enter a new era of decline and scarcity. What has happened, instead, is a remarkable growth in our ability to extract and refine oil from "unconventional" sources. Shah alludes to mining tar sands, but doesn't get into hydraulic fracking and other methods of producing oil from formerly hard-to-reach sources. If anything, the biggest problem we have with oil now is that there's more of it than we can safely use and not enough incentives to get off of it.

There are many developments in the story of oil that Shah by necessity misses by finishing up in 2004 - including the long slow spiraling out of the Iraq War, the soured "Arab spring" that led to crisis in Libya, and the rise of ISIS in Syria; the Obama administration's new fuel economy standards and investments in renewable energy; the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; the political battles over pipelines; the Paris climate agreement; the emergence of the electric vehicle market, particularly in California and Europe; and most recently the 2016 election, with its possible promotion of Exxonmobil's CEO as Secretary of State. But by far the biggest thing she misses is the boom in unconventional oil development, only faintly visible from her vantage point in 2004 and now half of U.S. oil production.

First chunk of the book would merit 4 stars; the closing section drops it to 3. Needs a new edition, at least.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oil: a blessing and a curse at the same time. It is such a controversial topic - maybe that is the reason why it is so fascinating.

It's a blessing, of course - it is the source of energy par excellence, that allows the exporting countries to get ridiculously rich.

It's a curse, sure it is - in the countries in which you can find big oil fields, even though they are very different from each other (Venezuela and Algeria, Iran and Perù, Sudan and Saudia Arabia...), after the first drillings their standard of living have been declining. The author writes that in Venezuela, before the oil boom during the 70's, there was democracy and that the per capita income was the highest in South America. What happened? And what happened to Gabon? In 2002 Shell, Total and other oil companies extracted 250.000 b/d (barrels of oil per day), and for a couple of years Gabon became the biggest importer of champagne in the world... yes, a big celebration! and now? Now oil is getting scarce and just 1% of its lands is still cultivated... because, once again, after the boom of oil, the country started to import tomatoes from South Africa, potatoes from France...

Sonia Shah writes incredibly well. This book is a perfect balance of datas, history and opinions. It is such an eye-opening book! It talks about the environment, the people who exploit this source, the people who are exploited to get this source, and the people who used to be in the system and that now have realized that this system has to be changed.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our foreign policy, our currency, our economy, our environment, our lifestyle all based on oil. It's dirty, it smells, it poisons; but we need it we need it bad and at the same time it can't be too expensive. This is an awesome survey of how oil runs the world in good ways and in bad. Very informative facts that enlightens us to just how much oil we end up using in a day; and the sacrifices made(by both the guilty and the innocent)to get us our oil. Had to give this a 5 star, we can never under-appreciate that extent to which oil runs our lives.

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is like, a well written and researched book but suffers from the problem that (like a lot of science writing with a political bend) most of the things that it is responding to (in a political context) are already passed which isn't like a slight on Sonia Shah (who is a really engaging writer) but rather its a problem that sort of gets at the roots of writing this sort of thing (it becomes obsolete or dated rather quickly).

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book on oil. starts with how oil is formed and moves into the economics and politics of oil production. Basically, talks about how the discover of oil in a country creates civil war, destroys the environment, and makes the people worse off.

[JennyB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Avoids the obvious areas related to this topic that we all know about, and goes off in some fascinating directions. One of the more interesting books on this topic I've read, precisely because it veers off the familiar path.

[Gerard Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting background and history to oil. Contrary to the title, it is not at all heavy going.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear and compelling account of corruption, contamination, and crime.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and disheartening look at the oil industry and it's history. Although it was written before the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

[Kathy Allert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this on my Nook in the dark during the recent power outage/Hurricane Sandy. Fascinating history/critique of the oil industry.