At 9:49 PM on April 20th, 2010, Dewey Revette noticed something terribly wrong on the Deepwater Horizon. Minutes later, the drill floor exploded. Eleven men vanished. For 87 days, the Macondo well vomited nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
This was not an accident of technology. It was the inevitable consequence of a civilization so dependent on petroleum that it would drill through a mile of ocean to reach it.
This is the story of oil: from the whaling fleets of 1846 New Bedford, hunting their prey to extinction for lamp fuel, to Edwin Drake's stubborn hole in Pennsylvania, to Rockefeller's ruthless monopoly, to the Deepwater Horizon burning against the night sky. The substance buried by ancient life that reshaped human civilization more profoundly than any other material in history.
How did we become so addicted that we would send men to their deaths to extract it?