Times are good for Big Oil. Corporate profits are unprecedented (Chevron netted a cool $14 billion in 2005); the world oil market is tight, compounded by “supply risks” Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria; the speculative impulses of the commodity exchanges have driven up the price of oil to $64 a barrel; and a former oilman (surrounded by other former oilmen) stalks the halls of the White House. As if that were not enough, the New York Times (March 27, 2006, p. 1) reports that, through a “vague law,” the U.S. government will waive, for the oil supermajors, about $7 billion in state royalties over the next seven years. Good work if you can get it. None of this prevented President Bush from declaring—as no other president has dared to do—that the United States is “addicted to oil” (which is to say, to the car). His program to reduce dependency on Middle East oil is laughable (not least because the United States will still be depending on someone—probably Africa— and because the Bush administration has already savaged other government funding designed to increase energy efficiency and alternative energy sources). All of this, as Toby Shelley reminds readers in Oil, goes back to the 1973 oil embargo and President Nixon’s Project Independence, designed to achieve U.S. self-sufficiency by 1980. (For the record, U.S. dependency on imported oil was 20 percent in the late 1960s and is expected to be about 66 percent by 2025.) The policy failed miserably, and Nixon (like Bush) resorted to maximizing domestic supply and turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal cost (p. 117).

The commodity—or the commodity chain—has been something of a warhorse for social science, providing a powerful optic through which the biography of the commodity can expose not simply the hard-edged political economy of use and exchange value under global capitalism but also the world of the commodity as spectacle, the fetish-world of Black Gold. In his neat and concise treatment of oil, Shelley focuses primarily on the former, the twin foci of what he calls “the global structure of the industry” and “vital political and social issues in the global energy sector” (p. 2)—although he explicitly excludes from his purview the complexities of energy trading and the downstream oil industry, such as refining and petrochemicals. Not surprisingly, in virtue of the ferocious debate surrounding the U.S. empire and the occupation of Iraq, there has been a rash of new popular books treading a similar path (one thinks of Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil [Seven Stories Press, 2004] and Matthew Yeoman’s Oil: Anatomy of an Industry [New Press, 2004]), but Shelley’s is among the best of the crop. He is a journalist associated with the Financial Times—has covered energy issues around the Middle East and Africa—but brings none of the pro-business or free-market triumphalism that one might expect from such an affiliation.

Shelley’s story is at once sobering and critical. He opens with the broad contours of the industry structured around the division among wealthy consumers and developing-country producers. Oil accounts for more than 66 percent of the world’s energy supply, and the growth of both gas and oil consumption is skyrocketing. The expected investment in the industry over the next 25 years is an astounding $6 trillion. The heart of the book is four related narratives. The first addresses the oil producers and the so-called resource curse by which wealthy oil producers are almost always unable to “sow the oil” in a way that either stimulates economic growth–diversification or improves standards of living. Oil wealth unleashes stagnation, massive corruption, violence, income inequality, environmental despoliation, and wasted windfalls. (Nigeria, to take one example, has $50 billion in oil revenues unaccounted for since 1970, and, according to the IMF, $350 billion of oil “does not seem to have added to the standard of living at all.”) The second is oil geopolitics, which reveals a dark paradox. Oil has been central especially to U.S. foreign policy (“energy security”), and yet in 2006 that policy is a massive shambles, indeed, a failure (the “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia, after all, produced September 11). Shelley takes readers through a riveting account of the garrisoning of the Middle East, the decline of Saudi Arabia as swing producer, the relations between oil and the war on terror, and the emergence of the key new actors, such as China and India, in the global oil sector. In the third part, he turns to petronationalism, most especially the rise of OPEC, its internal dynamics, the prospect of an OPEC for the gas (and liquefied natural gas) industry, and the struggle to open up (“liberalise”) what remains a strongly nationalized (i.e., regulated) energy sector. Finally, Shelley provides a brief discussion of alternatives (and what is clearly a global system with enormous rigidities) and the efforts (Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and George Soros’s Revenue Watch) to make corporate social responsibility in the oil sector have some teeth.

It all makes for pretty bleak reading. Not so much because oil is running out and people will all be walking to work soon, but rather because the oil sector can stretch out hydrocarbon capitalism—and turbocharged corporate profits—for a very long time.