Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline [Hardcover]

Lisa Margonelli (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 30, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In the last few years, just about everyone has had "oil on the brain" at some point, as record gas prices and a disastrous war have called our dependency into question. But though the U.S. burns 10,000 gallons of gasoline a second, few of us know how oil is created and drilled, how gas stations compete or what actually goes on in a refinery—let alone what happens in the mysterious Strategic Petroleum Reserve, where the U.S. government stores roughly 700 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Margonelli answers these questions and more, before examining some of the key patches in the oil industry's geopolitical quilt: source countries like Chad, where promises of real local growth fall hopelessly short, or China, which, "by 2025, perhaps, will import as much crude oil as the U.S. does now." Writing in a witty, first-person voice, Margonelli criticizes corruption in places like Nigeria, while expressing her "love of hydrocarbons" for the unlikeliness of their formation and the ingenuity required to extricate them. This is an original, open-minded look at a subject about which everyone has an opinion. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Margonelli has written about the culture and economy of energy for publications such as Wired, Discover, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In the summer of 2003, she started hanging out at independent gas stations, where owners might clear pennies per gallon of gas, surviving on impulse sales of junk food and soda. Her journey takes us up the delivery chain, spending a typical day with a tanker truck driver, hanging out with suppliers, touring refineries, and seeing what life is like at an oil rig. Whether visiting "wildcatters" in Texas, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the Gulf of Mexico, or the oil pit at the New York Mercantile Exchange, Margonelli charms her way into the good graces of insiders to report on the vast petroleum network. Her voyage takes us to Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, and ultimately the Persian Gulf, where she spends time at the Salmon oil fields in Iran. Filled with rich history, industry anecdotes, and politics, Margonelli's book brings a deeper appreciation of the complicated and often tenuous process that we take for granted. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First Edition edition (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385511450
• ISBN-13: 978-0385511452
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 6.6 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,011,995 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Facts *Can* Be Fun February 2, 2007

By Kimberly V. Davis

Format:Hardcover

As an environmental manager, I am so tickled when I find real discussion without an ideological agenda! (I call myself a radical moderate.) Ms. Margonelli is a true journalist. Her structure - Chapter One at the gas pump, back through the tanker trucks, refineries, drilling, geology--is a marvelous construct. Whle well-grounded in facts and engineering, this is somewhat a social history, and emphasizes profiles of people from the petroleum industry to illuminate the issues. I can't verify her extensive footnotes, but her lack of advocacy of a particular world-view (e.g., global warming, or faith in market forces) is refreshing. I am from West Texas so can verify the accuracy of these delightful depictions 'awl-fild trash'. Her statistics provide great insight into our energy challenges. Don't let her lose points in the non-fiction realm for her wry humor!

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Viewing Our Oil Addiction from a Dozen Interesting Angles April 13, 2007

By Steve Koss VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

For all its constant appearance in news of the business and political worlds, oil as an economic and chemically transformable commodity is remarkably little understood by the average person. Most of us have never seen a barrel of oil or an oil pipeline. Most of us have never watched oil being cracked in a petrochemical plant to produce gasoline or any of the dozens of other byproducts that permeate modern life. Most of us don't even know how much oil is contained in a barrel, or how much gasoline can be derived from a barrel of black gold. At most, we pull up at the pump and open our gas caps and our wallets. With OIL ON THE BRAIN, author Lisa Margonelli opens the doors into perhaps the most geopolitically and environmentally important world of the 21st Century, the mostly invisible world of oil.

Structurally, Ms. Margonelli starts at the familiar gas station pump and moves successively backwards through the distribution, production, and exploration chains. At the earliest stages of her exposition, most of which take place in the continental United States, she captures her subject matter through a personal prism - individuals who represents that particular stage in the process of bringing gasoline and heating oil to the end consumer. Thus, we learn about gas station profitability from Michael Gharib, owner of the Twin Peaks gas station in San Franciso, gasoline distributorship from the friendly folks at Coast Oil (owner David Mitchell, dispatcher Chris, and driver/hauler Roger), and refining from optimization manager Ken Cole at BP's plant in Carson, CA. Finally leaving California, we move on to lessons in drilling from fourth generation oilman C.D.... Roper somewhere in the wilds of East Texas, the questionable economics of the Strategic Oil Reserve in Louisiana from some nefarious deep cover security types with names like Mike and Buddy, and the commodities futures market from Tom Bentz, a senior energy analyst with BNP Paribas in Manhattan.

Having apparently exhausted oil and gas operations in the U.S. Ms. Margonelli proceeds offshore to the non-domestic sources of crude -- Venezuela, then Chad, Iran, and Nigeria - before closing in China, the world's most voracious new consumer of oil and the U.S.'s perceived strongest new competitor for the world's energy resources. To her credit, the author moves from domestic operations to the global petroleum stage while still retaining a human touch with her subject matter. Rather than falling into an expository trap and producing a dissertation on global petroleum economics, Ms. Margonelli continues her story through that of individuals involved in, or affected by, the oil industry. Of course, one cannot talk about Venezuela without dealing with Hugo Chavez, nor can one talk about oil in Africa without addressing the manner in which people's lives and homes in those countries have been ruined by Exxon, the World Bank, and Royal Dutch Shell in the cause of providing cheap gas to American SUV drivers.

Throughout her book, and particularly in its later chapters, OIL ON THE BRAIN offers remarkable insights into the global war over access to oil. The Venezuelan chapter presents the disturbing concept of external locus of control, the feeling of powerlessness ("The world is so strong, and I am so weak") that overwhelms and paralyzes the victimized villagers in these countries whose lives and livelihoods are sucked dry while the crude is being sucked from the ground beneath them. The Chad and Nigeria chapters reveal the failures of petrostate formation, the utter inability of corporations and governments to turn resource extraction into meaningful national development models due to incompetence, corruption, or outright indifference, and the Iran chapter tells the little known story of the U.S. government's shameful involvement in Operation Praying Mantis, a military action whose justification as self-defense was denied in 2003 by the International Court of Justice.

For all these details about the world of oil, Ms. Margonelli's most telling chapter may well be her last - China. Not because of China's seemingly insatiable new appetite for oil, but because of a concept car called the Asprire and Project 863. While the West remains stubbornly locked into a psychology of oil dependence that can barely see past corn-based ethanol, China's young entrepreneurs are working feverishly to develop the car(s) of the future - electric, hydrogen, or hybrid. In three intense months and with just $60,000, a group of students from Wuhan Institute of Technology developed a prototype, two-person commuter car that, as the author describes it, "is for the other 88 percent" of the world's population who don't already own cars. As Ms. Margonelli makes eminently clear, the real "China threat" isn't competition for scarce oil, it's having the entire auto industry be leapfrogged by some bright young engineering students in Wuhan. Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything You Need To Know About Oil...But Didn't Know How To Ask April 6, 2007

By Frederick S. Goethel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline" is the story, from beginning to end, of how oil is pumped, traded, refined, distributed and sold to the public. In addition, the book covers the conditions, both political and cultural, in a number of oil producing countries.

The book is divided roughly in half. The first half follows the flow of fuel from its start in the ground through the various handlers until it is pumped into your car. The author, however, doesn't just recite a litany of facts. She narrates well and adds information about the processes that are not common knowledge. The second half of the book is a look at where oil originates and the conditions in those countries as they relate to oil. And, the reality is that there is a socio-economic result of discovering and pumping oil from the earth.

The author does a wonderful job of weaving a story out of a number of rather dull facts and makes the book interesting, as well as informative. Her writing style reminded me of the books by Eric Schlosser or Barbara Ehrenreich.

After reading the book I found myself looking at gas stations in a new light and thinking about what I was doing every time I pulled up to the pump. I also noticed I was taking a few extra steps to try to cut my consumption a little. I think this book has a powerful message that needs to be read by the oil consuming public which may help to change their purchasing habits.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars This was an enjoyable book to read April 24, 2007

By Joel Feuer

Format:Hardcover

This was an enjoyable book to read because it presented an intriguing subject, it presented the subject in an even-handed manner, and it was well-sourced. Each chapter contained numerous footnotes that provided the reader the opportunity to consult other publicly available resources to learn more about the subject. I personally enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at the independent gas station, refinery, delivery business, and Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as it provided a comfortable understanding of how these businesses operate and corrects mischaracterizations that could have easily formed about these entities. I learned especially of the chemical similarities of branded gasolines, as well as the tiny profit margin earned by gas stations. I recommend this book with pride.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Book Makes a Complicated Subject Easier to Understand July 11, 2007

By Cindy W. Bonner

Format:Hardcover

In President Bush's 2006 State of the Union address, he spoke of America's "addiction to oil." In "Oil On the Brain," author Lisa Margonelli explains how we feed this addiction. Working backward from the gas station through the pipeline to the drilling rigs, and the oil fields of Venezuela, Chad, Iran and Nigeria, Margonelli narrates this journey all the way to China, which has become the new challenger to America's addiction with its "go-go growth" and its rush to put its 1.3-million population behind the wheel.
The early chapters of the book, before Margonelli turns to America's intervention in overseas petro-states, are my favorites, particularly the chapters on the California refinery and the East Texas drilling rig. The author has an uncanny ability to take a complicated process and boil it down for the lay reader. I now understand it's the size of the molecules in the crude that determines the octane, and how a shutdown at a refinery happens and why. I learned about the invisible penny that's built-in the price of gasoline, the 9/10 nobody sees that is worth $1.26-billion a year to the oil industry.

As Margonelli rides along on an oil tanker, she explains the strict regulations under which these drivers operate. In these chapters, I discovered how slowly oil moves inside a pipeline, less than eight miles per hour through the 161,000 miles of pipeline inside the United States. She arrives on the drilling rig in Freestone County, Texas, just in time to watch the ballet dance called "tripping the bit" where the driller, the tool pusher and the hands pull up a worn-out drill bit. The process can take as long as four hours. It's in this section that I also learned Florida and California have banned offshore oil rigs on their coasts, so Texas and Louisiana take up the slack....

The chapter on the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve segues into the importation of oil. Sixty percent of American oil is brought in from other countries, often from places that are hostile and strife-torn, run by governments corrupted by the oil it exports. It is in this section of the book that the reader begins to understand the true price of oil and how it compromises our country both ethically and economically. Not only are wars being fought globally for the precious few oil reserves still available, but big oil companies are building hospitals and schools in exchange for a chance to drill in certain promising areas of Africa and the Middle East.

On a smaller scale, villages and tribes are at war against each other over mineral rights, piracy is abounding and terrorism is growing, all with the oil industry and the incredible sums of money it involves at the root. In Nigeria, one terrorist is quoted as saying, "What I believe is that one gunshot is wordier than a thousand words."

This is a remarkable book with a powerful message, but written in a smart, open-minded, entertaining style that makes it a real page-turner. It should probably be read by anybody who stops for a fill-up, if for no other reason than to understand what all has gone into getting that gallon of gasoline into your tank. Read more ›