Oil on the Brain is a smart, surprisingly funny
account of the oil industry—the people, economies, and
pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating
a world we encounter every day.
Americans buy ten
thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it
much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from? Lisa
Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred
thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil
fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the
myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits
places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New
York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from
Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil
platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day
battle.
In a story by turns surreal and alarming,
Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an
oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading
floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil
fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed
the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and
Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit.
Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil,
Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for
American drivers.
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