A Crude Awakening

The documentary asks one question: what happens when the oil runs out. Through interviews with petroleum geologists, former OPEC officials, energy analysts and politicians, it argues about how close the world is to peak production. The film shows how nearly every detail of modern life depends on oil: transport, clothing, medicine, clean water. Footage of abandoned oil towns forms the background of the telling. Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack directed it together, with Reto Caduff also named among the directors. The music is by Philip Glass. The near-term peak the documentary argues for came under challenge in the years that followed; production rose rather than fell, on the back of shale gas and shale oil techniques. The question the film is actually asking, what it means to depend this heavily on one resource, remains where it was.