Why I Love Oil

Around two hundred million years ago a tiny, 2-millimeter long sea critter, its antennae as long as its body, fell to the ancient ocean floor. At the time, life on the continent – there was only one, the great Pangaea – was dominated by dinosaurs, who basked in a tropical climate. Plankton thrived in the world’s warm oceans, before falling when they’d wriggled their last.

Along with billions of other ancient marine organisms, that tiny invertebrate settled miles below the surface of the water. Other debris slowly crushed those zillions of tiny bodies and turned them into a waxy material known as kerogen. As that kerogen was buried deeper over eons, it came under immense heat and pressure. The forces became literally tectonic when first Africa then India broke away from Pangaea, the very bones of the Earth exerting unimaginable pressure on the seabed.

Through the magic of chemistry, that heat and pressure transformed the waxy ex-organisms into a thick, dense and magical substance – oil.

Oil dances with entropy. Rather than moving from order to disorder, as that second law of thermodynamics dictates, the dark mass of dead life became neat chains of carbon and hydrogen linked up to form the hydrocarbon molecules that comprise crude. These molecules are packed with the energy of the Sun itself, transported via plankton and plants, and transmuted by the immense power of our planet.

Sitting on my desk as I write this, I have a tiny glass barrel of the stuff, about the size of a coffee cup. I keep it there, black liquid sloshing up the sides, to remind myself how completely wonderful, and irreplaceable, this stuff is.

As an extraordinarily energy-dense material oil is essential for making artificial mechanical heart valves, for anaesthetics and MRI machines. Kerosene powers spacecraft – it is our ticket to the heavens.

Arguably, oil should be more valuable than gold – it’s certainly rarer. The universe is brimming with precious metals: one giant asteroid contains enough gold and other metals to make everyone on Earth a multibillionaire; and on some planets, it literally rains diamonds. But fossil fuels like oil are the product of life itself – which means they are unique, as far as we know, to our special life-supporting planet.

And…we burn it.

My tiny barrel is, excuse the pun, a drop in the ocean. Across the world we suck up a mind-boggling 90 million giant barrels of the stuff every day. Oil companies have located giant reservoirs of it where ancient seas were located, and use huge drills to drag it to the Earth’s surface. From the North Sea to Nigeria, the US to the UAE, these seams of liquid gold have become the basis of one of the world’s most powerful, profitable industries.

Today, Shell announced its largest ever profit in its 115-year history – from setting alight one of the most precious materials on earth.

The generations that follow ours will struggle to understand us. Not just because we allowed the scourge of climate change to creep across our planet. But because we caused that immensely destructive threat by burning a limited resource.

The irony is too painful: destroying the irreplaceable by burning the invaluable.

And don’t even get me started on moulding it into a plastic fork, used only once, yet outliving anyone reading this, and their great grand-children. Of course plastics are near indestructible in nature, all those bottles, bits and micro-beads are made from millions of years of heat, pressure and power. It’s like using the Mona Lisa for toilet paper.

We rightly condemn the oil companies for knowing about climate change as far back as the 1950s and pursuing their unbridled exploitation anyway. But we should also be outraged their willingness to waste oil in such egregious ways.

It’s not only environmentalists who should care about this.

Chemists and engineers, inventors and innovators, doctors and patients – everyone –should demand the capping of the wells and the end of burning fossil fuels and single-use plastic. We should be jealous of oil – guard each drop, Smaug-like, and treasure it as the black gold that it is. Anything that could be used instead of oil, must be.

No one hates combustion engines – machines of unthinkable waste – more than I. But I love the oil that powers them, and can’t bare the horrific, and destructive, waste of it. And now you’ve read my love letter to that sticky black deep-sea treasure, I hope…