She also details, in disturbing detail, how portions of the world economy have been, as she puts it 'optimised' to offer low-priced petrol to the American market.

Not to mention how the American political system has been "optimised" to keep petrol prices low at the pump.

She also challenges much of the way we see the oil industry. It's no longer just a contest beetween the West and a wellorganised OPEC cartel. Increasingly, she writes, there are "non-state actors" - criminal gangs and guerilla groups - involved in piracy and smuggling. Tankers seized by pirates in the Straits of Malacca, oil smuggling in Iraq and Venezuela, adding up to around 1% of world supply and rising. But it's impossible to know whether smuggled oil winds up in your local forecourt - a typical oil tanker can change ownership 300 times during one trip across the Atlantic.

Margonelli is particularly arresting about the oil industy in Nigeria, describing gangs of otherwise young men who steal oil from the pipeline and sell it on in small batches.

She describes the effect the trade has on the lives of people in Nigeria and how the regular disruptions in supply there can ripple through the global pricing for oil.

Another topic that Margonelli brings into sharp focus is the coming rise of the Chinese auto industry, for which the world's established automakers are illprepared. The 88% of the world's population that currently does not have access to a car of their own are the potential market for the Chinese, she writes.

They're going to need vehicles that are far less reliant on oil and China is tooling its auto manufacturers to sell into this potentially huge market.

There are pundits, like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute think tank (www. rmi. org), whose work she clearly leans on for some of her broader themes, even though she is far less optimisitc than Lovins about the ability of Western economies to shift out of oil as easily as they slipped into it.

She is also pays far more attention to the grubby underbelly of the oil industry, taking us places we might not otherwise think to go in understanding what it takes to get to our local forecourt.