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Prologue: The Journey It remains a basic fact of American life that, despite forty years of political fulminating, global conflict, and ever-increasing environmental awareness, most of us still take energy for granted. We take for granted that when we come home at night and flip on the light switch, the bulb will illuminate. We assume that when we turn up the thermostat, the heat will come on. And however acutely aware we may be of the price per gallon we pay, we take it as something close to a right of citizenship that when we drive an automobile up to one of the more than 100,000 gas stations in the United States, there will be fuel for our cars and trucks in the tanks beneath the asphalt. Without gasoline, the country would not run, and so there is gasoline , and barring extraordinary circumstances, there is plenty of it. The fuels that let us take energy for granted come from all over our country and our planet: mines in West Virginia, wind farms in Texas, and nuclear power plants in California. But no doubt the most vexed fuel we use is petroleum, and although we now import it from more than 60 different foreign countries (Canada now first among them, Saudi Arabia second), it has been the need for supply from the Middle East that has exercised such an outsized influence on our foreign policy, our environmental politics, and our national security. By the accidents of geology, the fossilized remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae when heated over millennia form crude oil and are nowhere more plentiful than in a 174-mile long reservoir known as the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia. Ghawar lies along the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, in the middle east of the Middle East, and buried beneath its sweltering sands is the biggest oil field in the world, having thus far produced 60 billion barrels of crude and providing to this day half the Saudi kingdom’s daily output. For decades, Saudi Arabia has been able 2 Prologue to act as a kind of central bank of oil, calming world markets at times of maximum scarcity by increasing output, as it did during the two gulf wars, and cutting supply when prices fall. Ghawar is what allows them to do this. It is their mother lode; in all of Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Nigeria, there is no deposit remotely its size. The story of how the crude oil pumped out of the ground at Ghawar travels to the United States to become the gasoline, the jet fuel, and the ingredient in tens of thousands of plastics and consumer goods that together keep the American river of commerce flowing tells us much about the shape of our world today: about the vastly complex and tenuous system of global transport whose constant smooth functioning underwrites our complacency about the sprawl that requires two-hour commutes and makes sport utility vehicles (SUVs) even imaginable. It tells us about the consequences of failed states in blood and treasure. And it tells us something about the strange and constantly shifting balance we in the United States have tried to strike between unharnessing all of energy’s potential to fuel economic growth and trying to limit its corrosive effects on our environment and our foreign policy. In short, to see how oil moves from Ghawar to our gas pumps depicts many of the most important issues this book confronts. The journey begins innocuously enough, with oil sufficient to fill 5 million barrels (or 210 million gallons) a day moving from beneath the sands of Ghawar along a pipeline to the coast of the Persian Gulf, where it arrives at Ras Tanura, the largest oil terminal in the world. Already by this point, however, security is an issue. Given Al Qaeda’s stated goal of overthrowing the Saudi monarchy and its desire to disrupt Western economies , every yard of pipeline is a potential target. To guard against the dangers of attack and the supply disruptions it would cause, the Saudis have the largest inventory of spare pipeline parts of any nation, much of it stored remotely along the pipeline route itself so that repair teams can be flown in by helicopter, access the needed materials on site, and get the oil flowing again as quickly as possible. The terminal at Ras Tanura, which processes 10 percent of the global output of crude, is itself a fortress with...

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