Prologue I was standing on a sand dune in Saudi Arabias "Empty Quarter," the vast, rust-red desert where one-quarter of the worlds oil is found, when I lost my faith in the modern energy economy. It was after sundown and the sky was dark blue and the sand still warm to the touch. My Saudi hosts had just finished showing me around the colossal oil city theyd built atop an oil field called Shayba. Engineers and technicians, they were rattling off production statistics with all the bravado of proud parents, telling me how many hundreds of thousands of barrels Shayba produced every day, and how light and sweet and sought-after the oil was. Saudi oilmen are usually a taciturn bunch, guarding their data like state secrets. But this was post 9/11 and Riyadh, in full glasnost mode, was wooing Western journalists and trying to restore the Saudis image as dependable long-term suppliers of energy -not suicidal fanatics or terrorist financiers. And it was working. Id arrived in the kingdom filled with doubts about a global energy order based on a finite and problematic substance-oil. As wed toured Shayba in a spotless white GMC Yukon, though, my hosts plying me with facts and figures on the worlds most powerful oil enterprise, my worries faded. Id begun to feel giddy and smug, as if I had been allowed to peek into the garden of the energy gods and found it overflowing with bounty.Then the illusion slipped. On a whim, I asked my hosts about another, older oil field, some three hundred miles to the northwest, called Ghawar. Ghawar is the largest field ever discovered. Tapped by American engineers in 1953, its deep sandstone reservoirs at one time had held perhaps a seventh of the worlds known oil reserves, and its wells produced six million barrels of oil a day-or roughly one of every twelve barrels of crude consumed on earth. In the iconography of oil, Ghawar is the eternal mother, the mythical giant that makes most other fields look puny and mortal. My hosts smiled politely, yet looked faintly annoyed-not, it seemed, because I was asking inappropriate questions, but because, probably for the thousandth time, Ghawar had stolen the limelight. Like engineers anywhere, these men took an intense pride in their own work and could not resist a few jabs at a rival operation. Pointing to the sand at our feet, one engineer boasted that Shayba was "self-pressurized"-its subterranean reservoirs were under such great natural pressure that, once they were pierced by the drill, the oil simply flowed out like a black fountain. "At Ghawar," he said, "they have to inject water into the field to force the oil out." By contrast, he continued, Shaybas oil contained only trace amounts of water. At Ghawar, the engineer said, the "water cut" was 30 percent.The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Ghawars water injections were hardly news, but a 30 percent water cut, if true, was startling. Most new oil fields produce almost pure oil, or oil mixed with natur Excerpted from The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.