Nonfiction: Crude World

NONFICTION
BP, the international oil company, made news in early September with an announcement that it had discovered a "giant" oil field deep below the Gulf of Mexico's sea floor, bolstering hopes that more discoveries close to the United States might be in the offing.

We shouldn't get too excited about the discovery, though. Experts suggest that retrieving the oil will be a slow process, and it wouldn't begin to meet oil-hungry consumers' demands, especially as other oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico continue to decline.

Besides, as Peter Maass writes in his fascinating if alarming new book, "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil," there might be far bigger news at hand.

Saudi Arabia, which boasts the world's largest oil reserves, may be nearing the end of its run as a peak oil producer, Maass writes. Of course, estimating how much oil remains in any given reservoir is not easy, and the Saudis discuss their oil output and reserves only in general numbers. They could have enough oil to last decades, Maass concedes. But that's not the issue.

"Crunch time comes long before the last drop of oil is sucked from the Arabian desert," he writes. "It begins when producers are unable to increase their output. If we do not know when that moment will arrive -- and it may arrive any day now -- we cannot know when to begin preparing for it, so as to soften its impact. The blow may come as a sledgehammer from the darkness. That's why the debate over peak oil is not just about numbers. It is about the future."

Maass, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, isn't necessarily talking about the distant future, either. Oil prices are likely to hit the century mark once the economy improves, and he predicts they will go much higher ("$250 a barrel, anyone?"), as the world's demand for oil increases and new fields fail to replace the output lost by aging reservoirs.

"Our requirements, in times of expansion, are too vast to be sated by younger but smaller fields," Maass writes. "Nor can we squeeze large amounts from new sources of 'unconventional' crude, such as tar sands in Canada and heavy oil in Venezuela; these forms of protocrude are difficult to convert into consumable oil and inflict extraordinary damage on the environment."

But at least oil-rich countries, many of them struggling to modernize, will enjoy a boom with rising prices, right? Not necessarily. For many, oil has proved to be a bane.

Maass visited several countries with large oil reserves, including Nigeria, Ecuador, Venezuela and Iraq, and he reports that while oil enriched the countries' corrupt leaders, it never trickled down to ordinary citizens. In fact, in many cases, it made life harder.

In Nigeria, for example, warlords fight the nation's armed forces for control of the oil fields, which are in turn polluting the land upon which the local population depends. In the meantime, Maass writes, "The World Bank estimates that 80 percent of Nigeria's oil wealth has gone to 1 percent of the population."

It's not merely the oil dictators who siphon off oil profits either.

"Even if Mother Teresa were president of Equatorial Guinea" -- instead of Teodoro Obiang, who controls bank accounts exceeding $700 million -- "the odds would be stacked against her subjects getting rich from the country's mineral wealth. That's because it is not just the thieving activities of government officials that make it hard for average citizens to benefit from oil booms," Maass writes. "The globalization of labor, combined with the small number of workers needed for capital-intensive oil projects, ensured that most Equatorial Guineans would watch others profit from the boom."

How's that for raining contaminated oil byproducts on your almost-out-of-the-Great-Recession parade?

Nightmare scenarios and grim reality checks are scary stuff, but Maass delivers the bad news in prose that teems with keen observations and well-reported, unforgettable details. (After all, the world may be flickering less brightly, but why should the written word not sparkle?)

In a Nigerian village, for example, Maass writes that a natural gas plant "shot into the air a plume of fire; the natural gas, burning furiously, sounded like a rocket launch." All night, every night, the fire cast a "Martian tint [that] was nearly bright enough to read by."

Of a warlord, fresh from a nap and watching a DVD of himself giving a speech, Maass writes, "He watched the TV with the look of a groggy sculptor sipping his first cup of morning coffee and assessing the previous day's work. He seemed pleased."

And consider this exchange. It's a model of concision and spoken-word rhythms, and its sardonic wit reads as if it belongs in a Graham Greene novel:

" 'Almost everything has to be imported,' Paces explained.

" 'How about paint?' I asked.

" 'Imported, sure,' he replied.

" 'Portable toilets?'

" 'Yes.'

"Equatorial Guinea had a lumber industry, so I asked whether the wood, at least, was local.

" 'No, imported.'

"Food?

" 'Most of it gets imported.'

"Construction cranes?

" 'You have to be self-sufficient here.'

"I pointed to the small rocks that had been lined up to denote the shoulders of a dirt road on the site.

" 'Those are local rocks, but importing them would be cheaper,' he said."

Readers of "Crude World" are likely to react as they would to a world-weary Greene novel: They have been darkly entertained, and warned.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.