Crude: The Story of Oil Book

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 ? 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.