The Poetry Of Petroleum?

Oil is the new oil. The events of the last few months have confirmed the criticality of fuel. But beyond the geopolitics of oil lurks an intriguing question: what exactly is fuel?Why do some things carry within them energy that can be released while other material show no such properties? For here is something utterly astonishing about a litre of petrol. Not because of its utility. The astonishing thing about petrol is that it transports an event that happened millions of years ago intact to our roads. It is a liquid like many others, yet capable of hurling five tonnes of metal down a highway.When you turn the key in your car, ancient sunlight is activated. Poetry aside, that is the truth. What we call oil is the energy of sunlight trapped in biological matter. Over geological time, that sunlight was transformed, compressed and preserved. And we get to use that today in our everyday lives. The energy of the Sun is the source of almost all fuels that have sustained civilisation. Coal and oil preserve its ancient light. Wind and rivers are its continuing work.Uranium is an important exception to this pattern. It is not a product of sunlight, nor of any form of life. Its past is more glorious—it precedes even the sun, back to a time of violent cosmic events that took place before our solar system even existed. When we split an atom of uranium, what we are releasing is not a product of life, but something that existed long before life itself.All fuels seem to share one property—their energy needs to be released before it becomes useful. It needs to be actively harnessed; without that intervention, it just expends the energy ever so gradually, so as to escape notice.In a sense then, the log was burning well before it was set on fire. Only the process was too slow to be visible. The log would be left to rot itself over large periods of time. What we call rotting is in fact another kind of fire. And not just a log—a nail that rusts in the rain goes through the same transformation. A fire is more theatrical—its intention is more hungry and obvious, but in some senses the rusting, rotting, decaying are just the names we give slower, milder forms of fire. The gentleness of the vocabulary used is misleading, for the difference lies not in the journey but in the speed of travel.But the nail is not fuel in spite of the fact that it releases minute quantities of energy over time. The energy it leaks out slowly from the metal and vanishes into the ether, much like how a whisper is lost in a crowded room. What makes rust rust and petrol petrol is that the latter releases energy fast enough for us to use it.What makes fuel special is its ability to keep a form of the past alive in the present. It hoards energy, keeping it intact until it can be released with speed. Unlike a fossil, which is also a record of the past, fuel is inert but alive. A fossil is the past made perfect, fuel is the present made continuous. Fuel is history in three dimensions, the past still capable of action rather than merely of being remembered.Fossil fuel accumulates over geological time but expends itself in biological time. In nothing else, does so much time get extinguished so quickly. Fuel is the most barbaric consumption of time that we can see. Human beings are the voracious beasts that treat millennia with casual contempt, using up millions of years of heat and pressure to move a few kilometres.The same is true of a grain of wheat. Like petrol, it stores sunlight that is meant to power the next generation of the crop. We rob this energy for our own purposes. A grain of wheat and a litre of petrol have more in common than is obvious. Both carry the consequences of a past event in a form that remains available for future use, provided something comes along that can harness it.These objects have the rare ability to refuse to die easily. Fuel has a reservoir of life within it, one that gives it a robust afterlife. Seeds give birth to the next generation. DNA passes on traits. Food transfers sunlight from this generation to the next.A feature of all forms of life is that they are driven to carry the past forward. Life is hardwired to produce life. Human beings, in particular, have evolved many ways, beyond biology, of storing the past for the use of the future. Writing stores thought and brings the collected wisdom of the past for the use of the future.Money is a store of labour which makes exchange possible. What we call civilisation could reasonably be seen as a way of making the present continuous with the past, of ensuring that a new generation does not begin from zero all over again. The past is not over. We are testimony to that. Not only do we come from the past, but we consume it in prodigious quantities to keep us going. As if there were no tomorrow.