Oil, money and greed

OIL AND geopolitics is a sexy subject, prime material for writers and historians with an eye on the underlying themes of the recent past. Daniel Yergin’s The Prize set the standard almost 20 years ago and the author has updated his seminal story to account for the boom (and semi-bust) of the last decade.

Otherwise, books for the general reader have appeared only sporadically. This has changed. The obsession with energy supply, the apparent dwindling of resources, the worries about impending environmental catastrophe and the conflicts across the globe since 2001 are behind a surge in literature trying to make sense of it all. Biographer Tom Bower’s new book The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century is the pick of the bunch.

It tells its story through a shifting lens that takes in the industry’s most compelling personalities. That approach suits the author’s gifts as a biographer of the great and occasionally good: Bower has also written controversial accounts of disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and other luminaries with quirky pasts, such as Mohammed Al-Fayed and the entrepreneur Richard Branson.

If there is a hero of his narrative it is BP’s former chief executive, John Browne. Yet he’s also the book’s antihero and it isn’t an entirely flattering portrait of the man once dubbed the greatest businessman of his generation. Suggesting hubris, the account of Browne’s pursuit of first Amoco and then Arco relies on bested opponents who still seem happy to stick the knife in. ExxonMobil’s executives seemed particularly keen to snipe at BP and its “Sun King”. But Browne’s drive to launch BP into the stratosphere of global energy firms was, Bower shows, the impetus for many of the structural changes in the corporate sector that defined the era of big oil as it entered the boom years of the last decade.

Petroleum Economist