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A Tank Full of Gas, A World Full of Trouble

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

sent by Mark Graffis (activ-l)

Chicago Tribune Special - Jul 29, 2006
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-oilsafari-html,0,7894741...

A Tank Full of Gas, A World Full of Trouble

By Paul Salopek
Tribune correspondent

Last summer, a new gasoline station opened in South Elgin, an old farming
village on the Fox River that's now being swallowed by the westward sprawl of
Chicago.

As service stations go, it's an alpha establishment. A $3 million Marathon
outlet with 24 digital pumps, a computerized carwash, a Goodfella's sandwich
shop and a convenience store lit up like an operating room, it sells
everything from ultra low sulfur diesel to herbal "memory enhancer" to Krispy
Kreme doughnuts. Infrared sensors activate the faucets in its immaculate,
white-tiled bathrooms. The coffee kiosk's floor is real hardwood.

Howard Dunbar's Tanker Truck 6 rolled into the station one chilly night last
September. An amiable ex-cop, Dunbar drives for an independent fuel hauler. At
9:25 p.m., he stepped down from the cab, set out the safety cones, hooked up
his hoses with a reassuring click, and then proceeded to unload 7,723 gallons
of gasoline and diesel into the station's underground tanks.

It took Dunbar 29 minutes to empty his swimming pool-size cargo--a workaday
chore that reveals the triumphs of our motorized civilization but also the
seeds of its possible end.

The diesel streaked past a tiny glass porthole on the truck's hoses in a smear
of pale yellow, like beer, while the premium unleaded ran colorless as vodka.
That particular night, according to one industry method of calculating the
explosive energy locked away in crude oil, Dunbar dumped the liquid equivalent
of 19.2 million hours of physical labor into the Marathon's storage tanks--or
the power of a slave army of 2,200 men working around the clock for a year.
This bonanza would be sucked dry by customers in 24 hours, a small, stark
example of the nation's awesome petroleum appetite at a time when the planet
appears to be lurching into an energy crunch of historic proportions.

By now, most Americans realize that something is profoundly awry in the global
oil patch.

For the majority of motorists, like the "swipe and go" customers at the South
Elgin Marathon, the evidence is painfully obvious: record-high fuel costs that
have surpassed last year's infamous price spikes following Hurricane Katrina.

Yet to truly grasp the scope of the crisis looming before them, Americans must
retrace their seemingly ordinary tankful of gasoline back to its shadowy
sources. This is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's vast and
troubled oil dependency. And what it exposes is a globe-spanning energy
network that today is so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly
unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever.

"I truly think we're at one of those turning points where the future's looking
so ugly nobody wants to face it," said Matthew Simmons, an energy investment
banker in Houston who has advised the Bush administration on oil policy.
"We're not talking some temporary Arab embargo anymore. We're not talking your
father's energy crisis."

What Simmons and many other experts are talking about is a bleak new collision
between geology and geopolitics.

Below ground, the biggest worry is "peak oil"--the notion that the world's
total petroleum endowment is approaching the half-empty mark, a geological
tipping point beyond which no amount of extra pumping will revive fading oil
fields. Peak oil theory is controversial. Many think it alarmist. Yet even Big
Oil is starting to gird itself for possible fuel shortages: Chevron, the
nation's second-largest oil company, has bluntly declared that "the era of
easy oil is over" and is warning energy-hungry Americans that "the world
consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered."

Aboveground, things look little better. Most of the world's petro-states,
aware that crude supplies are growing increasingly valuable, have limited
drilling rights to their own oil companies.

In the meantime, humanity's thirst for petroleum continues to run wild.
Producing nations are pumping at maximum capacity. Yet the competing energy
demands of America and rapidly industrializing China and India now threaten to
outstrip global oil output. China has displaced Japan as the No. 2 oil
importer, after the United States. Chinese oil imports are projected to double
to 14 million barrels a day over the next 20 years. Many credible analysts
foresee a new "energy cold war" as the U.S. and China square off over the
planet's last reserves.

The new Marathon station at Illinois Highway 25 and Middle Street in South
Elgin turned out to be an ideal laboratory to parse these sobering issues.

A typical canopy-and-box structure, the station helps feed Chicago's explosive
growth westward, into the exurban boomtowns where McMansions hit the corn. It
sits at a stoplight some 40 miles from downtown Chicago. A gravel quarry
operates across the street. Nearby, an old game farm once extolled by Ernest
Hemingway has vanished under golf courses and shopping malls.

Most important of all, exclusive access to industry refining data made it
possible, for the first time ever, to track the oil consumed by this one gas
station back to the dusty war zones, belligerent autocracies and tottering
nation-states where it came from.

For years, oil companies have insisted that this could never be done.
Conventional wisdom holds that America's colossal oil flows get mixed
together, swapped among companies and rebranded too many times to pinpoint the
actual source of your $40 purchase of unleaded. The industry has encouraged
this belief for years, partly to avoid boycotts.

Yet with a little research, and proprietary data supplied by the Marathon
Petroleum Co., the Tribune could trace with unparalleled clarity virtually
every bucketful of trucker Howard Dunbar's shipment back to its distant
origins.

On the hydrocarbon menu that September night, in round figures:

Gulf of Mexico crudes--31 percent
Texas crudes--28 percent
Nigerian crudes--17 percent
Arab Light from Saudi Arabia--10 percent
Louisiana Sweet--8 percent
Illinois Basin Light--4 percent
Cabinda crude from Angola--3 percent
N'Kossa crude from the Republic of Congo--.01 percent

For a span of five months, from September through February, other fuel
shipments to the station were analyzed for their crude composition. Molecules
swirled through the South Elgin Marathon's gas pumps from Nigeria, Iraq and
Venezuela, as well as from declining oil fields in the United States.

Taken together, they revealed the immense human costs, the boggling technical
investments, the hardball politics, the hidden exploitation and, ultimately,
the alarming fragility of America's epic oil addiction--as seen through the
prism of a local gas station. U.S. consumers and faraway producers were
finally tethered, without resorting to metaphor or guesswork, by a clear oil
trail.

Thus, $73.81 worth of unleaded pumped one Saturday afternoon by a Little
League mom was traced not simply back to Africa, but to a particular set of
offshore fields in Nigeria through which Ibibio villagers canoed home to
children dying of curable diseases.

Every day, the jaded tanker drivers brought human stories echoing in their
trucks. They plunked their long wooden measuring sticks into the Marathon
station's 40,000-gallon underground tanks, and the resulting subterranean gong
evoked--depending on the changing oil vintage--an Iraqi ex-colonel's cavernous
loneliness. Or the laments of a West African fisherman named Sunday, afloat on
a fishless stretch of the Atlantic. Or the songs of Marxist Indians reveling
in their newfound oil wealth atop a dusty South American plateau.

The voices of Chinese oil prospectors gurgled inside all of the fuel
shipments. And diluted in the gas came a warning that many Americans seem
unprepared to hear: Our nation's energy-intensive joy ride, powered by 150
years of cheap petroleum, may finally be coming to an end. This could be as
good as it gets.

"We're almost done," said Dunbar, the trucker, on that first night. He is a
busy man. He worked without complaint in a thin T-shirt stenciled "Beverly
Hills Polo Club." A cold prairie wind shot across the Marathon parking lot,
needling the bones.

He carried his invoice into the convenience store. The night clerk, a scrappy
young woman named Kelly Hanson, stood behind the register, ready to parry the
night's oddballs and hard cases, the cops and strippers, the heads who
wandered in asking where to buy dope.

"Hello darlin'," Hanson said grandly. Dunbar grinned. When he left at 10:10
p.m. the Marathon stood empty, glowing under its glacial white floodlights. In
the darkness beyond stretched the hungry energy maw of the Midwest--a naked
cornfield, silent Highway 25 and the indistinct shapes of new tract homes.

This is how it begins, our travelogue of addiction.

***

'Did that Nissan pay at 19?" Marta Perez, the morning-shift clerk, asked as
she peered out at the pumps from behind her register.

"He didn't pay me," said her colleague Anthony Ratajczyk.

Ratajczyk has the rubbery face of an old boxer, which is what he is. His nose
has been broken nine times.

"Well he didn't pay me either," Perez muttered. "Michelle! We got another
drive-off!"

It was September. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had delivered their one-two
punch to the energy-rich Gulf Coast, swamping New Orleans and disabling the
offshore wells and pipelines that yield a third of America's domestic energy
production. In South Elgin, population 20,000, gas prices at the Marathon had
broken the $3-a-gallon barrier. And the Bubbas and Barbies--industry lingo for
the working-class men and white-collar commuters who keep convenience stores
solvent--were misbehaving. They were stealing Michelle Vargo's gasoline.

"You'd think it would only be the crummy cars, but people in nice cars are
doing it too," exclaimed Vargo, the frazzled station manager. "I never seen
anything like it."

Vargo, 36, is too young to recall that this had happened before, during the
Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

Nor did she and her small band of employees appear to fully grasp the ominous
economic and political forces churning around their local gas station. Few
Americans do.

In typically murky industry fashion, the station is branded and supplied by
Marathon but actually owned by an independent fuel retailer--in this case,
Prairie State Enterprises of Barrington. Freelance shippers called "jobbers"
haul the gas. And even though much of the station's petroleum does in fact
bubble from Marathon's own oil patches, the company as often purchases its oil
from Exxon Mobil, Iraq's Southern Oil Co. or Venezuela's PDVSA, a swaggering
national oil company with its own patriotic song.

If the South Elgin Marathon ever inspires an anthem, it would be dedicated to
Vargo. Many of America's gas stations are matriarchies. The owners simply
trust women managers more. Vargo's loyalty and work ethic showed why.

A single mom with a hard-edged life, she is a dynamo with hair permed into
stringy curls like fusilli pasta. She walks with the stoop of the continually
put-upon. In a ruthless business that actually earns a pittance from gasoline
sales (oil companies and refiners snatch the bulk of the fuel's profits long
before it reaches the pumps), she struggles to stay afloat. Her station's
income comes from the incidentals of frantic modern life: cigarettes, energy
drinks, stay-awake pills, the Lotto, and sweet and salty snacks. Her workers
love her.

"If Michelle leaves, I leave," declared morning clerk Perez, 34, another
single mother who moonlights tending bar at a local pub where she is known as
"Shorty." "At $7.75 an hour? You gotta be kidding. She's the only reason I
stay."

The clerks are a motley group clad in vests made of blue polyester, itself a
petroleum product. Many are the working poor. Some can't pay their bills.
Several still live with their parents. The night maintenance man, Dwayne
Graff, lives in a trailer and always seems one small misfortune away from
homelessness. Vargo advanced him $20 over the weekends out of her own purse.
She gave them all second chances and sometimes third chances.

During the days of post-Katrina gas banditry, Vargo deployed her troops
shrewdly, with a platoon sergeant's care. She bought a cheap pair of
binoculars to log license plates. She ordered Perez to park her rusty Mazda at
pump 19, to block the station's quickest escape route. Then fuel allocations
kicked in for a week--many gas stations were limited to one tanker delivery a
day--and Vargo's voice hoarsened from stress and cigarettes.

"The worst, the absolute worst, thing that can happen is to run out of gas,"
she groaned in her closet-size office behind the pizza oven. "The customers
will never come back."

The gas station phone rang. It was her son in juvenile hall. Could he come
back home and stay with her?

"No," she said calmly, and hung up.

Vargo drives to work in a car she can't afford. It is a white Chevrolet
Suburban that churns out a ruinous 10 miles to a gallon and rides so high off
the street she has to boost herself into the driver's seat as if jumping into
a saddle. Her two-hour daily commute, about 40 miles each way from Lockport,
roughly double the national average. Still, there are times when the
extravagant vehicle seems the only reliable part of her unsettled life.

"I don't feel safe in small cars," Vargo said defensively, refueling one day
at the pump.

She seemed worn and jittery. It was the end of an 11-hour shift. She was
headed home to a house shared with two teen daughters and a 4-foot iguana--a
place she would soon vacate because she couldn't make the rent.

The only perk for the station employees is free coffee. There are no discounts
on gas. Vargo bought $40 of regular unleaded. She rubbed the heel of one hand
tiredly into her eye sockets. With the other, clutching the pump nozzle, she
touched a faraway sea.

***

In 1940, the United States was the Saudi Arabia of the world. It produced 63
percent of the planet's oil. Today, after years of frenzied pumping, it
generates 8 percent.

About a third of Vargo's fill-up that day came from the last major pool of
crude remaining in oil-starved America: the basement of the Gulf of Mexico.
Trace it from seabed to suburbia, and you X-ray America's aging industrial
innards.

It started 9,000 feet inside the crust of the Earth, in Miocene Epoch rocks
that have the consistency of oil-soaked beach sand. The rocks simmer near the
boiling point of water. This is known in the business as the "pay zone."

punctured the Atlantic floor near a submerged hillock called Viosca Knoll 786.
It shot up 1,750 feet of pipe to an offshore production rig and got shunted
ashore to a huge tank farm in St. James, La. There it began its long journey
to the Midwest in a pipeline big enough for a person to walk in, albeit
hunched over--a 632-mile-long artifact of our oil dependency that will
doubtless astound future archeologists.

Arriving at the Robinson refinery in southern Illinois, it got cooked and
cooled for five days inside 23-story towers monitored by hard-hatted engineers
who pedal around the facility on bicycles. Then it gushed through 16- and
12-inch fuel pipelines for three days until it reached a 40-year-old tank farm
near O'Hare International Airport. Finally, it traveled its last 12 miles to
the South Elgin Marathon inside Howard Dunbar's truck. Whenever Dunbar braked
at stoplights, the shipment sloshed tidally forward.

The enormous cost of this elaborate capillary system, built over generations,
helps cement our reliance on hydrocarbons.

"Takes a bit of power to bring it up," hollered Ferrell Martin, 52, a senior
mechanic aboard Petronius, a drilling platform that juts above the gulf's
waves near Viosca Knoll. "Our generators could electrify a small town."

The platform, co-owned by Chevron and Marathon, came on line in 2000. It cost
more than $500 million to build, nearly what the United States shells out
every 24 hours to buy imported crude. A masterpiece of high technology, it
pumps the energy equivalent of 60,000 barrels of oil and natural gas a day--a
gusher that matches Pakistan's national output and is only slightly behind
Italy's.

Petronius is gigantic, almost beyond imagining. If the steel-legged platform
were the 110-floor Sears Tower, the ocean's bed would muddy the lobby, and the
sea's surface would lap at the antennas. Go 40 feet higher, and you would
finally reach Martin's workplace--a swaying 10-story cube of valves, piping,
generators and windowless crew quarters inhabited by about 90 men. Clad in
blue Chevron overalls, they lean into one another as if passing on secrets;
they're shouting into each other's faces to be heard over the howl of
machinery.

Under the mistaken impression that they were crowning this technical wonder
with a grand name, Chevron executives christened the rig after an infamous
debauchee of Roman Emperor Nero's court. Regardless, Petronius is impressive.
It is a fitting monument to America's empire of oil.

More than 100 such gargantuan structures dot the gulf. As do an estimated
6,500 other oil-related features such as wells, pumping stations and helipads,
not to mention some 30,000 miles of submerged pipelines tangled like spaghetti
across the gulf floor. On any given day, swarms of oil company helicopters
mutter through the gauzy marine air. Armadas of supply boats chalk the
lime-peel-green ocean surface. On the horizon, gas flares burn palely.

This is Martin's strange, metallic, largely womanless world. Almost certainly,
it is also America's last great oil rush.

"The future is here," said Martin, a big, friendly Cajun with a nose like a
hatchet. "The onshore fields are fading."

***

One man who keeps Michelle Vargo's gas-guzzling Suburban rolling doesn't have
an oil worker's rough hands. He sits in a red granite skyscraper in Houston
and speaks in what sound like Zen koans: "the topography of sound," "sand is
silent" and "the trick is not to know when to believe your data, but to know
when not to believe it."

Jeff Rutledge, a senior geophysicist for Marathon, was making a point about
the increasingly difficult search for the world's last accessible pockets of
conventional crude.

"No question, we're facing a whole new game," said Rutledge, a sandy-haired
New Orleans native. "Sure, there's a lot of resources still out there, but
they're getting riskier to invest in, much harder to find and more expensive
to reach."

The quest for oil is tireless, exhaustive, obsessive--and if Marathon's
technology and exploration department is anything to judge by, highly
eccentric. Brainy geologists use their office windows for blackboards,
scrawling equations on the glass with felt-tipped pens. Others wear strange
goggles in a small, theater-like room, peering up in silence at 3-D chunks of
the Earth's crust. Desks are piled with what look like old eight-track tapes:
computer drives that contain volumes of exploration data that beggar belief.
Seismic surveys, the industry's main tool for locating oil, involve setting
off small shock waves at the Earth's surface and recording millions of
"echoes" from the rock below.

"One typical seismic project contains about the same amount of data as your
DNA code," Rutledge said. "Two or three surveys together contain the
equivalent of all the information available on the Internet today."

Progress reports from 10 to 20 of these fantastically pricey, high-tech quests
from Africa, Russia and the North Atlantic land on Rutledge's desk every day.

According to industry optimists, such herculean efforts to squeeze out Earth's
last high-quality oil are the best retort to doomsayers who worry that the
world is running on empty.

Out in the gulf, for instance, Petronius' 19 wells do things engineers
couldn't dream of a quarter-century ago. They snake downward through almost
1,800 feet of seawater, bore vertically through a mile and a half of rock, and
then veer off laterally under the stony seabed for distances of up to 5 miles.
This is the oil-patch equivalent of drawing blood from a hidden vein--with a
hypodermic needle 180 feet long.

Such whiz-bang technology has encouraged the U.S. Minerals Management Service
to boost the Gulf of Mexico's potential oil reserves by 15 percent, to 86
billion barrels. That's enough, in theory, to meet U.S. demand for another
decade. Much of that, however, lies in deep, environmentally sensitive waters
near the Florida coast and is prohibitively expensive to extract using current
technology.

"Cost aside, we don't see any immediate shortage in the resource at the global
level," said Bob Greco, an exploration analyst with the American Petroleum
Institute, the industry lobbying group. "Innovation will keep pushing the
envelope of what's recoverable."

Many oil executives also insist that much of today's oil woes are actually
man-made: Environmental restrictions and stingy foreign governments keep
valuable reserves locked up.

Skeptics, however, dismiss this as mere wishful thinking--a "cornucopian"
belief that, somewhere, somehow, nature will still bail humans out.

The United States gulps a quarter of the crude pumped on the planet, industry
critics point out, yet it sits atop just 3 percent of the globe's reserves. No
amount of new drilling will change this. The awesome and costly platforms that
stride ever-deeper into gulf waters are symbols of a junkie's desperation,
they say, not hope.

"You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental
shelf and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won't
reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline," said Rep.
Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), a senior member of the House Science Committee.
"We're just sopping up what's left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole."

Bartlett belongs to a small but suddenly influential band of pessimists who
are ringing alarm bells over peak oil.

The theory of peak oil is based on the studies of M. King Hubbert, a
pioneering U.S. geologist who correctly predicted in the 1950s that America's
huge crude output would "peak," or hit a ceiling, in 1970. Nobody disputes
that the phenomenon is real. The output of all oil reservoirs begins to
decline after about half of their oil is extracted. Today, peakists cite
anemic oil discoveries since the 1980s, plus ominous drop-offs in production
in major fields in Kuwait, China and Mexico, among other places, as evidence
that the world, too, is reaching its fateful peak.

Estimates of when we will hit this milestone vary from "we've passed it
already" to the U.S. Geological Survey's latest calculation of 2044--hardly a
reassuring date, given that rocketing oil prices and their attendant social
chaos would stagger the industrial world well before that reckoning.

In the beige corridors of Marathon's Houston skyscraper, certain absences
hinted at the waning age of cheap, easily tapped crude oil. Because of the
high costs and diminishing returns of modern exploration efforts, Rutledge
said, Marathon's technology and exploration staff has shrunk. Much of the
exploration work is farmed out. Also, oil discoveries are getting smaller;
hardly the giant "elephant" finds of bygone eras, most are like elusive
rabbits.

Rutledge gazed out his window at the overcast city below. Small homes in the
neighborhood were being torn down and replaced by hulking trophy houses.

Using available technology, he said, Petronius' bounty likely will shrivel in
12 to 15 years.

***

Michelle Vargo was off duty. She slumped at La Fuente bar in suburban
Lockport, nursing a beer and staring hard at her South Elgin Marathon
paycheck: $1,049.31 for two weeks' labor.

"This is impossible," she said. "I'm spending a third of my take-home on gas."

At her elbow sat Roy Draino, 42, Vargo's boyfriend. He is a man prematurely
wizened, like a boiled-down version of some larger self, and he wants Vargo to
quit the gas station.

"She comes home and can't relax," he said. "Last night they called her eight
times--eight times--over some goddamned drive-off. It ain't worth it."

Vargo's whole life, it seems, is bound up with burning petroleum. Her father
was a long-haul trucker who was frequently gone. Before working at the
Marathon, she had managed three gas stations for Phillips. And even her
hard-bitten beau is in the business.

Draino scrubs oil refinery furnaces for a living. The work is undependable.
U.S. refineries have dwindled from more than 300 to just 145 over the last 25
years. Industry blames this perilous bottleneck in the nation's gasoline
production on environmental red tape and public opposition to new oil
infrastructure--BANANA they call it, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near
Anybody. But critics claim that Big Oil actually likes the status quo; the
inevitable shortfalls drive up gas prices.

Vargo's cell phone rang. This time it was her ex-husband calling. He'd gotten
wind of Draino.

"We're livin' together, so what?" Vargo said.

"He wanna talk to me?" Draino said coldly.

"I'll make sure to invite you to the wedding," Vargo said stonily into the
phone, and obscenities erupted from its small speaker.

A melee ensued. Draino grabbed the handset, growled "Hello! Hello!" and strode
out onto the sidewalk. Vargo's eldest daughter, Brittany, 15, was there. When
she heard Draino berating her father, she began screaming at Draino.

Vargo sighed and laid her head on the bar counter. Even her family life is a
form of internal combustion.

The next day at the gas station, her eyes were red. As usual, she kept her
woes to herself. She, Marta Perez and Joni Hanson, the mother of night clerk
Kelly Hanson, decorated the convenience store with cardboard Halloween
pumpkins and fake spider webs.

A customer suddenly poked his head through the door: His pump wasn't starting
properly.

"Darlin'," he drawled to the clerks, "could you please turn me on?"

***

Ferrell Martin was also in distress.

Home from his usual two-week shift aboard Petronius, the strapping Cajun oil
worker was getting hopelessly lost.

Martin's ancestors had fished and trapped the watery maze of Bayou Terrebonne,
a fabled swamp about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, for more than 200
years. But today, Louisiana's lush wetlands, the richest in America, are
dying, crumbling into the sea. Martin knelt at the bow of a bass boat steered
by one of his numberless bayou relatives, trying, again and again, to get the
boat unstuck from hidden bars of mud.

"I can't even find the same fishing holes anymore," Martin said, fanning away
mosquitoes. "The whole place is just sinking away."

It's been widely known for decades that flood-control measures on the
Mississippi River are chewing away at Louisiana's biologically rich coasts.
The river's sediments are being flushed disastrously out into the deep sea.
And the swamps aren't being replenished; a marshland the size of Delaware has
already washed away. But new studies suggest that oil and natural gas
extraction may be another culprit.

The U.S. Geological Survey believes land in and around Bayou Terrebonne is
starting to sag like a deflating wineskin as fossil fuels are pumped out in
massive quantities. In some places, it has settled 11 inches. For a landscape
that is in many cases only a few feet above sea level, the implications are
ominous. Erosion and subsidence have eaten away at least 2 miles of coastline
near Ferrell Martin's modest house in Montegut, La.

He recognized the irony: Oil has yanked thousands of once-impoverished Cajuns
into the middle class, but it is now helping swallow their ancestral homes.

"Everything's a trade-off, I guess," Martin said, baiting another hook with a
sardine and casting his line into what used to be dry cattle pastures in his
youth.

This, too, gets burned up by the cars in South Elgin: a clod of southern
Louisiana.

***

Y103.9--The Beat of the 'Burbs--was piping Don McLean's "American Pie" into
the Marathon gas station store.

As usual, five truckloads of landscaping crews showed up at 7:30 a.m.:
exhausted-looking Mexicans with bed head and chin stubble tanking up on junk
food and energy drinks. Among them was "Mr. Ding Dongs and Coke," so known for
the breakfast he always buys. At the gas station, customers don't have proper
names. They are called "darling," "honey," "sweetie," "mi hijo" ("my son") or
simply referred to by the products they consume.

Gas prices remained high--just easing below $3 a gallon. The drivers were
sometimes rude.

A skinny old man with the face of a closet drinker stalked in from the pumps.

"$49 for half a tank of gas! Jay-sus!" he snapped.

"I know, I know, sir," said clerk Joni Hanson.

"It's a rip-off. A total scam!"

"I don't set the prices, sir."

The old man paid. He vowed angrily never to return.

"He'll be back," clerk Marta Perez told Hanson. And she was right.

Chapter 2: The frontier

The lot occupied by the South Elgin Marathon--Kane County parcel No.
0636200008--first entered recorded history in 1836.

Land records show that the 4,500-square-foot station is part of a homestead
cleared by a pioneer named Thomas Mitchell, who arrived by wagon from New York
and settled in the beautiful, parklike Fox River Valley soon after the local
Sauk and Fox Indians were crushed in the Black Hawk War.

This part of the nation was once called the Northwest Frontier, and it was
coveted by settlers for its rich soils and abundant hydropower. America's
aggressive history of expansion--its sense of entitlement to boundless energy
and resources--has never really paused. Indeed, now it extends to all corners
of the world.

River Valley in suburban South Elgin. Its name is the Akwa Ibom. And though it
helped keep gasoline bubbling from the Marathon pumps on a busy corner of
Highway 25, its real headwaters lie 8,000 miles away in the malarial swamps of
Nigeria.

There, crude flowing from offshore fields near the Akwa Ibom's tropical delta
supplied the station with roughly a quarter of its oil. This was just one tiny
rivulet in the alarming torrent of foreign-bought crude that prompted
President Bush, one of the most oil-friendly presidents in history, to concede
in his latest State of the Union speech that "America is addicted to oil,
which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

In its 2005 annual report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says
that 58 percent of all the petroleum burned in the United States now comes
from abroad. That stark dependency on outsiders, analysts say, will grow even
if the last pockets of oil in America are drilled.

"We know how important this issue is," said Laura Binning, 37, a regular
customer at the South Elgin Marathon. "But it's so big. It's hard to get your
head around it."

Binning pulled her black H2 Hummer into the station one Saturday afternoon
when Qua Iboe crude from Nigeria made up about 26 percent of her $72 gas
purchase. She was taking her son Parker, 8, to Little League. She estimated,
sheepishly, that her vehicle gets 10 city miles per gallon, moderately better
than a semitrailer truck.

"At first it's on your mind," Binning said. "But then you get so busy. I got
screaming kids. My mom's got cancer. And I work as a real estate marketer out
of my house. So you forget."

Binning exudes no-nonsense competence. With her husband, Tim, she rents houses
and owns a RE/MAX All Pro real estate franchise in the western suburbs. They
and their three children live in a grand home on 2.7 acres in St. Charles, an
upscale suburb adjoining more working-class South Elgin. (Brian Wilson of the
Beach Boys once owned a mansion nearby.) Aside from Laura's Hummer, the couple
own two other vehicles. Their swimming pool heating bill in October topped
$2,000.

Laura flashed a wan smile while ticking off her energy bills, just as she
winced hearing herself describe the Hummer as "something that signals success
to our clients." She knew how that sounded.

But as it happened, the Binnings were among the few gas station customers to
ponder America's energy future beyond tomorrow's uptick in gas prices. They
grappled with buying an electric-gasoline hybrid vehicle as their next car.
They followed the news about peak oil. They fretted over the kind of world
their three rambunctious boys--Weston, 3, Spencer, 6, and Parker--would
inherit.

In the end, like most Americans, they were optimists. They had little choice.
Their livelihood--selling property in suburbia--rests primarily on a dubious
supposition: the continuing abundance of cheap crude. Laura faces this reality
every day. Shuttling the boys across the suburbs to piano lessons, floor
hockey practice, Little League and hip-hop dance classes, she can rack up 40
miles or more in the Hummer.

"Are there problems coming? Maybe. But I prefer to think the glass is half
full," said Tim, 37, arriving home from his office one afternoon after a
commute of 19 miles each way. "When shortages jack up oil prices permanently,
someone will have the incentive to invent another fuel. That's how the market
works."

"Like you work--you're a workaholic," Laura gibed in her best Hepburn-Tracy
style.

"I am not."

"You were working on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, even on Thanksgiving."

"I love my job."

The Binnings were sitting in their living room. Their boys played hand-held
computer games. Outside, snow slashed diagonally across their ample lawn.

***

Felicia, Beatrice and Comfort were running through Itak Abasi. Breathless.
Their bare feet drummed the Nigerian village's sandy alleyways. In their small
hands they clutched packets of rehydration salts.

The medicine was free, distributed by health officials at the local school.
The village wells were tainted with fecal matter. And people were dying of
acute gastric infections, possibly cholera. Two children had succumbed that
day. Another two would die the following week. The doctors were angry. They
said this was by no means an exceptional occurrence.

Itak Abasi--"Foundation of God" in the local Ibibio language--is a rural slum
festering atop a sandbar at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River. Its hovels squat
half a mile from the Exxon Mobil oil export terminal that supplied the bulk of
African crude purchased by Marathon and sold in South Elgin. Since 1971, the
facility, a sprawling tank farm, has funneled billions of dollars worth of
petroleum to the United States. Itak Abasi seethes next door with neither
plumbing nor electricity.

"The oil companies are no good," said villager Sunday Jeremiah, 40. "We are
crying daily." He is a fisherman. And the running little girls--age 10, 11 and
13--are three of his seven children. They raced each other to the family's
palm-leaf hut, stepped over a doormat of periwinkle shells and handed Jeremiah
the medical salts. Then they darted away, singing nonsense songs. So far,
nobody happened to be dying in the Jeremiah family.

Exxon Mobil's local subsidiary, Mobile Producing Nigeria, pumps the local oil
fields in a joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. The U.S.
oil giant has a complex relationship with its destitute neighbors. On one
hand, it helped renovate the village's schoolhouse. But it also spilled at
least 40,000 barrels of crude into the sea in 1998, a fiasco that fishermen
say permanently destroyed the village's traditional livelihood.

The powerful Texas-based company is both courted and reviled by the Ibibio
people. The Nigerian central government is for the most part invisible in the
backwater region, so everyone turns to the Americans for solutions. When asked
why villagers didn't dig latrines--a simple way to blunt fatal
gastrointestinal epidemics--Itak Abasi's old, bald-headed chief snapped,
"That's the oil company's job!"

Itak Abasi and South Elgin are alike in this way--resentfully hooked on the
life-altering power of oil.

The only difference:

In America, it is the scarcity and cost of petroleum that feed anxiety and
outrage, whereas in Africa--where Jeremiah sat in his dim hut, staring hard at
the hydration salts in his stubby fisherman's hands--it is the substance's
taunting abundance.

***

Few Americans realize it, but they have hitched their wagon--or rather their
210 million cars and trucks--to Africa's troubled star.

It is a striking development. The planet's last superpower is rattling its
half-empty oilcan at the poorest continent in the world.

This state of affairs has come about because two-thirds of the world's oil is
controlled by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC,
and most of it is pooled in the Middle East. Chronic instability in that
region--today stoked by the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Israel's battle with
Hezbollah--has further encouraged the United States to hedge its oil bets
elsewhere. American companies have trudged to the plateaus of Central Asia
looking for low-quality oil. They are punching wells into the ecologically
fragile shallows of the Caspian Sea. And they are investing billions in
upgrading huge but risky oil fields in business-hostile Russia.

None of these new energy frontiers, however, has captivated industry
boardrooms like Africa.

The continent will never match the lavish petroleum endowments of the Middle
East. Nigeria, Africa's oil heavyweight with 36 billion barrels of reserves,
boasts only a seventh of Saudi Arabia's bounty. Still, African crude has its
advantages. It is light and low in sulfur--well-suited to pollutant-sensitive
U.S. refineries. Its reservoirs are closer to major East Coast ports. And
American companies can do business on the continent unhampered by the terror
war tensions that dog them elsewhere.

Americans already get more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. By 2015,
oil experts say, African states will supply a quarter of all U.S. imports, up
from 15 percent today. The United States quietly signaled this shift in 2002,
when the State Department declared African oil a "strategic national
interest," meaning in diplomatic code that U.S. troops may intervene to
protect it.

"I think the U.S. military would find our swamps worse than Iraq," snorted
Austin Onuoha, a Nigerian human-rights activist who specializes in oil issues.
"But at least they might build some infrastructure after they invade.
Americans always do this, right?"

Onuoha's sarcasm was well-earned. He was talking in the dark, from his
blacked-out house in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The electricity in Africa's
petro-giant had winked out again. And this fit sourly into his main thesis:
Oil is rotting Africa's frail democracies.

Nigeria, like Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Republic of Congo and Sudan,
suffers from what Onuoha and many other human-rights experts call "the oil
curse." In short, geysers of easy petrodollars corrupt weak African
institutions. They unleash reckless government spending. And they usually
stoke internecine fighting over oil loot and entrench political thuggery.

To fully experience oil's harrowing legacy in Nigeria--the fifth-largest
exporter of crude to the United States--you must catch a plane to Port
Harcourt, the decaying commercial center of the Niger Delta.

By now "P.H.," as the locals dub it, should be the booming capital of a
tropical oil kingdom that spouts as much crude as three Alaskas. Instead, it's
a handmade slum. Foreign oil workers zip between the few slapdash hotels in
curtained mini-vans, hoping to avert kidnapping by criminal gangs and ethnic
militias. The hotels are guarded by men sporting aviator sunglasses and
Kalashnikovs. In April, a car bomb, Nigeria's first, rocked the city. In this
way, Nigeria is looking more each passing day like the Middle East.

The bloodiest chaos unfolds mostly unseen, however, out amid the syrupy brown
rivers that braid the mangroves before sliding into the Atlantic. There,
armies of the poor battle the government, foreign companies and each other for
a fair share of oil wealth. The impulse is understandable. According to the
World Bank, 80 percent of Nigeria's staggering $340 billion in oil revenue has
been pocketed by 1 percent of the population--a cast of thugs who include the
world's most venal politicians and generals.

Rounding out the picture is world-class pollution (at least 4,800 oil spills
over a 20-year period), "bunkerers" (oil thieves who drill into pipelines,
often incinerating themselves and hundreds of others in the process), and
brutish military tactics (Nigerian troops torching thatched villages and
strafing oil smugglers' barges with helicopter gunships). Nobody knows the
death toll in the delta. Yet if the killing was once ignored, that's no longer
the case.

The tightest crude market in 30 years is turning Nigeria's obscure swamp
skirmishes into a global energy flash point. Nigerian insurgents fire off
e-mails to the media announcing their next attack on a Shell platform--and
crude futures quiver in Tokyo and New York. Oil first hit the $50-a-barrel
mark in 2005 when an SUV-driving warlord named Mujahid Dokubo-Asari threatened
"all-out war" in the delta.

"We know the world covets Nigerian oil more than ever," said Onengiya
Erekosima, a Bible-quoting spokesman for the Niger Delta People's Volunteer
Force, one of many militias that flourish in the lawless squalor of Nigeria's
oil patch.

"We will force the international community to respond to our suffering,"
Erekosima declared, "because we can cut off their crude at any time."

He made this threat in his underwear while seated on an old couch in Port
Harcourt. It was 11 o'clock at night. Iron bars protected the doorway of one
of his movement's safe houses. A bare light bulb jaundiced the mostly barren
room. The pantless rebel dug a handful of hand-scrawled manifestoes from his
cheap briefcase. Proudly, he waved a message from the White House:

"On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence. We appreciate
hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. Due to the large volume of
e-mail received, the White House is unable to respond to every message, and
therefore this response is an autoreply."

About a quarter of Nigeria's 2.3 million-barrel-a-day crude flow is regularly
choked off by the likes of Erekosima.

In Itak Abasi, Sunday Jeremiah's fishing village, the oil war seemed far away.
But this was an illusion.

"No jobs, no running water, no electricity, no opportunity, no dignity," spat
one furious youth, who gave his name only as Festus. "I am going to carry a
gun. I am going to blow up some wells. Otherwise you get nothing in Nigeria."

Tribal sorcerers were daubing young men with chicken blood out in the swamps.
Palm wine libations were being offered to the ancestors. This would protect
Ibibio militants from bullets, which would "pass through us without harm,"
Festus said, "like stones through water."

***

In South Elgin, Michelle Vargo was Scotch-taping notices to the Marathon's
convenience store countertops: "FREE CANDY BAR IF CASHIER DOES NOT SUGGEST A
PRODUCT OR SERVICE."

Post-Katrina gas theft had eased when prices ebbed to $2.85 a gallon--the
apparent pain threshold of American motoring. But the convenience store sales
had slumped. Since they represent 80 percent of the station's profits, the
owner, Prairie State Enterprises, was leaning hard on the staff--and
especially on Vargo--to vend.

The gas station store's 550-item inventory exceeds the shopping choices of
even the biggest supermarkets in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

But that didn't help Vargo. What do jaded American drivers want? What do they
need?

She offers them 88 varieties of cigarettes, 111 types of cool drinks, eight
flavors of Tums antacid tablets, three choices of mini-pizzas warming under
heat lamps, banana nut cappuccino, AC/DC ball caps, ultra-ribbed condoms,
7-inch locking pliers, and the Denzel Washington version of "The Manchurian
Candidate" on DVD. For the spiritually inclined she stocks "Cheech & Chong's"
incense and two kinds of Native American dream catchers--meant to ward off bad
spirits--made in China and tagged at $9.99 each.

"I'm gonna walk away if the pressure keeps up," Vargo said. "I'd hate to do
it. I was here during construction. I feel like this station is mine. But I
can't take it forever."

Her cell phone rang. She took the call outside. She paced the pumps, her free
arm gesturing wildly under the pearly winter sky. She was ignored by the limo
drivers in their dead men's suits. By the grumpy and overworked truckers. And
by a man who arrived every day to break a $20 bill with an M&Ms purchase so he
could play the Lotto machines.

The station's key commodity--refined petroleum--was as invisible as ever. The
only evidence that it even existed was a faint tang of gasoline.

***

Almost every night, Sunday Jeremiah climbs into a motorized open boat and
confronts the monster crosscurrents at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River.

Two waters, salt and sweet, clash there like fanatical armies. They throw up
huge, erratic, three-cornered waves that could swamp the most accomplished
seaman. Yet Jeremiah threaded them standing, his knees bent to absorb the
slamming of the rollers, one hand firmly gripping the outboard's steering
handle. Deftly, he goosed the boat up cliff-like swells and sleighed down
their watery backs to safety.

"It is nothing," he shrugged, much as a U.S. commuter might dismiss the
workaday lethality of the interstate.

Jeremiah was returning home from the high sea--"eye sea" in his delta
accent--after an awful night's fishing. Assisted by a lanky colleague named
Sunny, he had unspooled 500-yard-long drift nets near gas flares that blazed
like minor suns. Six hours of work gleans one basket of bonga, a fish the size
of a hand.

"Onshore wind," Jeremiah said stone-faced. "Fish don't like it. It pushes them
deep down."

He also blamed oil spills--something Exxon Mobil denies. "[P]ossible effects
are assessed after any type of [spill]," company spokeswoman Susan Reeves said
in a written statement. "Such assessments have indicated no losses, in terms
of type or quantity of fish."

The corporation says it paid coastal communities millions of dollars in
restitution after the huge 1998 spill. Reeves added that Exxon Mobil's
subsidiary, in cooperation with the Nigerian national oil company, also spends
an additional $10 million to $12 million a year on community development in
Nigeria, most of it on education, health, roads, micro-enterprises and
agricultural assistance.

Little of such money is evident in Itak Abasi, however. In May, angry mobs
attacked the company's tank farm in a dispute ignited by a lack of jobs. Local
people took oil workers hostage. And at least one Ibibio youth was shot dead
by Nigerian security forces. The sorcerers' juju didn't work.

Dawn was breaking as Jeremiah returned home. The flares burned holes in the
sky along a pink horizon.

His thatched hut was still darkened. His wife, Rosalie, crouched on the dirt
floor inside, fanning the embers of a cooking fire. Children stirred on their
palm-leaf pallets. Exhausted and salt-stained, Jeremiah laid back on a rough
wooden bench and dozed off to the mutterings of a portable radio. The
newscaster was eulogizing Stella Obasanjo, the wife of Nigeria's president,
who had just died in Spain--after cosmetic surgery, or so the local press
said.

Jeremiah's catch fetched 450 naira at the local market, about $3. His boat
engine had swallowed $6 in fuel. As it happened, it was Oct. 27, the day when
Exxon Mobil announced record quarterly oil and gas profits of $7.35 billion.

***

Tim Binning's cell phone rang. It did this on average 60 to 70 times a day. He
has a 4,000-minute-a-month account. This time it was Laura. A washing machine
at one of the Binnings' rental units was on the fritz.

"Go ahead, buy the new one," he advised. "Repairs will cost us almost as
much."

Tim was at work in his car, a new Volkswagen Phaeton, a luxury sedan that the
couple decided to purchase instead of a hybrid. (Laura worried about trading
in the devalued Hummer at a loss.) The sensor-activated wipers slapped away a
gray slush, and a satellite navigation console glowed on his dashboard.

A landscape utterly decoupled from Chicago's core slid past Tim's windshield
in icy tableaux: Starbucks, horse pastures, big-box stores and old farm-town
clapboards marooned amid strip malls. It seemed a place more congenial to
automobiles than human beings. People rarely appeared on sidewalks. Yet this
suburban backdrop is where more than half of Americans now live.

"Few people here go into downtown Chicago anymore," said Tim, dodging traffic.
"When they relocate, it's between suburbs. When they go to work, it's between
suburbs. And when they commute it's in all directions. This makes mass transit
impractical."

Tim is as adept at reading the asteroid belt of Chicago's edge-city sprawl as
Sunday Jeremiah is at coolly appraising the sea.

He noted "mature" versus "hot edge" housing developments and could accurately
eyeball square footages while zipping past at 40 m.p.h. He saw the invisible
county lines--and property tax differentials--that helped explain why builders
erected modest $120,000 townhouses on one corner and $500,000 McMansions on
the other. He pointed out that U.S. houses are vastly more heat efficient
today than 20 years ago, but added that all these energy savings are eroded by
constantly ballooning dream houses: The number of homes larger than 2,400
square feet has doubled since 1987, even as U.S. families continue to shrink.

"Look at what people have now," he said. "Two cars is the norm. So is two or
three color TVs. Who in the 1950s had that?"

Tim parked in front of an aging ranchette. The house was for sale. He was
assessing its value after its pipes froze, resulting in major water damage. He
ordinarily didn't do this anymore. He handled high-end investment properties.
Stepping through the cold, stained, empty house in his suit and raincoat, he
seemed anxious to leave.

Yet this, according to James Howard Kunstler, was a showcase home of the grim
new America to come.

Kunstler, a writer of some renown in urban planning circles, is the Ghost of
Christmas Future for peakists. While most analysts confine themselves to
debating when the planet's oil supplies will start to slump, Kunstler has
plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes. Citing everything from
highway maintenance protocols to Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" inventory
system, he paints a harsh vista of oil-deprived life ahead.

"America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its
national wealth in a living arrangement--suburban sprawl--that has no future,"
he asserts in his 2005 book "The Long Emergency." "Suburbia has a tragic
destiny."

Kunstler envisions the car-dependent landscape of the suburbs, especially the
farthest-flung subdivisions, decaying into "slums of the future." He sees the
doors of oversize, unheated tract homes flapping open forlornly to the chill
Midwest winds. Big-box retailers that rely on trucks that get, at best, 8
miles per gallon to deliver sneakers made in China will simply implode, he
says. The cavernous shell of the local Wal-Mart will "become anything from an
infirmary to a Pentecostal roller rink."

In this bleak vision of a slower, poorer, brown-out world, only trains and
barges will be efficient enough to move goods. And millions of Americans will
return, painfully, to their agrarian roots. With the enormous energy inputs of
industrial agriculture a vanished luxury (up to 16 calories of fossil fuel are
now required to produce a single calorie worth of grain), huge amounts of
manual labor will be needed for survival-level farming.

Many critics call such predictions hysterical. But a high-powered study
released last year by the Department of Energy, the so-called Hirsch report,
warns that even with a concerted national effort it could take decades to
transition from oil to fuel alternatives, and that "without timely mitigation,
the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented."

With crude prices soaring into orbit, powerful people are listening. Peak oil
theory, espoused by the likes of one of Bush's billionaire friends, Richard
Rainwater--a Kunstler acolyte--helped persuade the president to insert the
"addicted to oil" phrase into the State of the Union speech, according to some
Washington insiders.

Back in his car, Tim called Laura to arrange a meeting at a mall eatery 12
miles away. Lunchtime congestion was thickening. He sat, just another commuter
alone with his cell phone, in a long line of vehicles at a red light.

Americans consume about 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline each year simply
idling in traffic. This equals the annual oil output of Equatorial Guinea,
Africa's most promising new petro-state.

***

Sunday Jeremiah lay in the prow of his boat.

It was another clammy night at sea. The sky was curdled an angry orange; such
is the brilliance of the gas flares reflected on clouds dragged south by West
Africa's harmattan winds. Some children in the Niger Delta know night skies of
no other color. Starlight is alien to them.

Jeremiah bolted upright when a loud quacking surrounded the boat. The sound
was exactly like a large flock of ducks--except it was coming from under the
water.

"Bonga," he said of the small inshore fish. "They make this noise."

He muscled in his long net. It was completely empty.

***

Cruz Rodriguez looked up from the Marathon parking lot: Canada geese were
honking overhead, paddling through a sky gray as the inside of an ice cube.

Rodriguez is a 23-year-old station clerk. He raised his push broom like a
shotgun and took aim. He watched the birds fly out of sight. He went back to
sweeping the station lot again.

It was Christmas Day. The Marathon never sleeps. A cross-section of
America--schoolgirls, Bubbas in pickups, rapper wannabes in chains and
baggies--stopped to fuel up in red Santa caps. Rodriguez wore one too.

Then the gas station phone rang. It was Michelle Vargo, just checking in.

"She's called five times today," Rodriguez said, shaking his head in
amazement.

He was a former gangbanger. Jail had made him philosophical. He once reminded
Vargo: "It's just a gas station. When it comes down to it, that's all it is."

The station's computers showed the Marathon sitting atop 10,353 gallons of
regular and 2,867 of premium. (Midgrade gasoline draws from both tanks.) About
2,600 gallons of this energy bomb came from Sunday Jeremiah's simmering coast.
Rodriguez wasn't interested.

"I got my own worries," he muttered. He has a criminal record. "I wanted to
enlist in the Army, but they wouldn't take me. They'd of had my butt in Iraq
by now."

A month later, in the form of 8 gallons of gas--in essence, the merest vapors
left in an empty tanker truck--Iraq would come to him.

Chapter 3: The war

The giant Rumailah oil field in southern Iraq is a war cemetery.

Rusting tanks, artillery pieces and eroding stumps of concrete blast walls jut
like rotted teeth from the sands of the surrounding Ash Shamiyah desert. Some
of the war junk is old, dating to the Iran-Iraq conflict. But much of the
debris is newer: troop carriers and gun emplacements incinerated by U.S. or
British jets during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Gas flares smudge the barren
horizons a dirty khaki brown.

The few roads are empty and cratered. It is a scene of unsurpassed ugliness.
And it is guarded by scruffy men in baggy blue uniforms: Iraq's new Oil
Protection Force, the custodians of the world's third-largest petroleum
reserves.

"This must be a joke!" snapped Mazin Yousif, peering out from the back seat of
his SUV at a sandbagged OPF checkpoint. "Impossible!"

A former colonel in Saddam Hussein's army, Yousif, 49, works for Olive Group,
a British security firm that specializes in oil field protection. He had just
spent 18 months training 4,500 Iraqi recruits to patrol the nation's vital
southern oil fields against sabotage and fuel smuggling.

But strange new faces were appearing at the checkpoints. They were the bearded
members of local Shiite parties and their violent militias. His oil army was
being infiltrated. In places like Rumailah, Iraq's boggling oil wealth was
falling prey to sectarian greed.

A stiff, bespectacled man cocooned in body armor and escorted by a three-car
convoy of British and Iraqi bodyguards, Yousif glared at the militiamen. They
squinted back with open contempt.

"We are living in the Chicago of gangster times," Yousif said bitterly back at
his house in Basra, the seedy port city that is Iraq's southern oil capital.
"Mafia Chicago, without the nightclubs."

As it turned out, during that particular week, about 30,000 barrels of the
Rumailah field's production -- high-quality crude dubbed Basrah Light -- were
headed for Chicago. They were part of the Middle Eastern energy habit that the
United States vowed to kick after the Arab oil embargo of 1973. The U.S. still
buys 15 to 20 percent of its imported crude from the unsettled region.

It was late November in Iraq. Date harvesting season. Victims of Sunni-Shiite
violence were being dumped, at the rate of five or six bodies a day, into the
dry canals of Basra.

Yousif, an old secularist like most ex-members of Hussein's Baath Party, sat
alone in his walled home. Three guards with machine guns patrolled his yard.
Insurgents have threatened to kill him for cooperating with the coalition. For
their safety, he sent his wife, Suad, and his daughters, Zaineb, 19, and
Souhira, 14, into exile in the United Arab Emirates. (He'd been shot on the
job already, in the leg, by unknown assailants.) A frustrated hunter, he
spends hours at his computer looking at pictures of wild birds.

Three days before Yousif's disconcerting checkpoint encounter, a supertanker
named the Front Crown loaded up on Iraqi crude at the Basra Oil Terminal.

The black-hulled vessel, flying the flag of the Bahamas and skippered by a
Russian, chugged 36 days around the Horn of Africa, then steered northwest
across the Atlantic to Galveston Bay. Five days later, according to Marathon
schedulers, it docked at the high-tech Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, where
pumps as mighty as locomotives sucked a million barrels of oil from its hold
in 11 hours--the same volume of crude that was burned by all the Allied armies
in World War I.

Most of the cargo ended up at refineries across the Midwest. A wisp, about 126
tanker trucks' worth, traveled north through pipelines to Marathon's Robinson
plant.

These molecules snaked north through the Midwest at the pace of a walk, past
rural roads whose telephone poles sometimes bore small, beribboned photos of
local GIs killed in Iraq: a bitter enough irony, given that large volumes of
crude are now being diverted in Iraq, intelligence sources say, to fund the
anti-U.S. insurgency.

Indeed, of all the setbacks since the fall of Hussein, few match the ruinous
decline of Iraq's oil sector--once deemed by the Bush administration to be the
economic salvation of the country.

The Iraqi fuel reached South Elgin in a stew of Nigerian, Saudi and domestic
hydrocarbons. Cruz Rodriguez, the Marathon's night clerk, bought 5 gallons on
the chilly January night it arrived.

"Check it out, dude," Rodriguez said.

He ran a hand over the worn upholstery of his first car, a 1995 cherry-red
Jeep that buried him $8,000 in debt. It gets 18 miles per gallon.

Rodriguez was all but broke after fueling up. He bought a 25-cent Zebra Cakes
cookie for dinner. Working the cash register all night, he glanced
compulsively out at the Jeep. He seemed worried it might disappear.

***

What are the hidden costs of America's imported oil? The answer is complex. It
may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn't daunted the likes of Milton
Copulos.

A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation--a
right-of-center Washington think tank--Copulos spent 18 solid months poring
over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a
price tag on America's addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related
defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments
lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of
some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million
each.)

Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive
findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon.

When he isolated the hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the
price jumped to $11. This included a war premium that swelled the Pentagon's
spending to protect all Persian Gulf oil to $137 billion a year. In a truly
transparent economy, by Copulos' math, filling up Rodriguez's Jeep would run
about $230.

Consumers don't dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures. Instead,
they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their
children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt--one that's
increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs of
their oil habit, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy
gluttony.

"Gas isn't too expensive," said Copulos. "It's way, way too cheap."

Or, as he put it to senators, quoting the cartoon character Pogo: "We have met
the enemy and they is us."

In fact, many experts think Copulos' Olympian feat of accounting is still much
too conservative. Nobody can really calculate, they say, the future security
cost incurred by funneling petrodollars to regimes that have incubated Islamic
terrorism, such as Saudi Arabia. Or tally foreign oil's role in global
warming.

Or, for that matter, amortize loneliness.

***

No credible U.S. analyst pegs the agonies in Iraq primarily to oil. But Mazin
Yousif does. Because, in effect, he has to.

"The Americans will not allow anything too terrible to happen here," Yousif
said hopefully, a reference to the country's immense oil potential. "If you
control Iraq, you control the economy of the world. I think, eventually, the
coalition will help Iraq become stable and prosperous like Qatar or Kuwait."

His convoy was circling a dusty neighborhood in Basra. Gunshots popped
sporadically in the distance. Riding shotgun with AK-47s tucked beside their
seats, his bodyguards scanned the sidewalks, communicating by radio. When the
street was empty, they gunned the vehicles to a metal gate and hustled Yousif
through.

Once inside, the Iraqi plunked his combat helmet onto a kitchen table with
disgust and chucked his flak jacket onto the carpet. In this way, at a time
that always changes, he ends his commutes from the oil fields.

The house was silent. Yousif's son, Ali Yousif, 22, was absent again. Ali was
the only family member who refused to evacuate Iraq for his own protection.
Lately, he had been rebelling against his father's taut discipline. There were
arguments over household chores. And the young chemical engineering student
had begun spending lots of time at a local Sunni mosque, a hazardous display
of faith in sectarian and Shiite-dominated Basra.

Yousif worries that his son is flirting with religious extremism. Shiite gangs
in the city--the Mahdi Army, Master of Martyrs and others--have whipped
schoolgirls for dancing at coed picnics, fire-bombed "impious" liquor stores.
They have also dragged Sunnis and ex-Baathists, like Yousif, into the canals
of no return.

"It cannot be easy to be the son of a former officer," Yousif admitted,
looking in on Ali's vacant bedroom. "He is a good boy, but others put ideas in
his head. I have tried to be his friend, to turn him around."

Waiting for Ali, he sat down at his computer. He began clicking through
pictures of birds. "Look--cranes," he said. "We have beautiful cranes in
Iraq."

***

Like Mazin Yousif, Cruz Rodriguez was awaiting the return of a loved one.

He was tapping out an e-mail at the Elgin public library.

"Hey bro, just got your e-mail and was able to get away from work for a bit of
time ... Would really like to meet up and do something like shoot some pool or
if you know where we could go fishing ..."

Rodriguez was writing an older half-brother who had walked out of his life 16
years before. Rodriguez had located the man by sheer chance, as you can only
in America: He'd spotted him on an episode of Oprah, about rekindling a sex
life in marriage. A few minutes' search on the Internet connected the rest of
the dots.

The Marathon night clerk punched the "send" button. He blinked at the empty
screen--a pale, stocky kid with "Rodriguez" tattooed on one side of his neck
and "Pure Pleasure" on the other. Then he drove to the Marathon to work
graveyard.

Cops show up at the station like clockwork at midnight every night, looking
bloodless under the astringent lights. They buy coffee and cigarettes. Then
come the usual insomniacs. The bar-closing refugees at 2 a.m. And, a bit
later, haggard strippers from Blackjacks, a men's club on Highway 25.

"Know where to buy some dope?" one asked, drunk.

"This ain't an all-service station," deadpanned Rodriguez.

That night he sold more than 1,000 gallons of regular: enough to quench
America's 250-gallons-a-second oil thirst for the space of a few heartbeats.

***

Iraq's state-run Southern Oil Co., one of the biggest petroleum corporations
in the world, occupies a sprawling, concrete cube in Basra.

Its halls are hung with bright new posters. They announce in Arabic, "With Our
Oil, We Realize Our Ambitions." Yet a peek into any office reveals unhurried
people drinking sweet tea over ancient electric typewriters. Or abandoned
desks. Or snoozing security men in their stocking feet. The reception office
is decorated with a large portrait of pudgy-cheeked Moqtada Sadr, the
hotheaded Shiite cleric who has twice rebelled against U.S. forces and would
doubtless like to again.

barrels, is being managed.

Vice President Dick Cheney predicted the country's output might surge by
500,000 barrels a day within a year of Baghdad's fall. These liquid riches
were then supposed to bankroll the nation's reconstruction, as well as supply
U.S. markets.

President Bush's then-chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was even
bolder. "When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5
million barrels of production to world supply," he said in 2002. "The
successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."

Since then, reality has been harsh.

Iraqi output still sags far below prewar levels despite a recent allocation of
$1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to patch up Iraq's decrepit oil fields.
Violence stunts production. In mid-July, gunmen abducted the head of Iraq's
Northern Oil Company. Demoralized Iraqi oil workers are burying pipelines in
concrete to keep insurgents from blowing them up.

World-class reserves are being pumped at full blast, a procedure that shortens
the life of the reservoir but generates lots of money. Corruption, meanwhile,
is blatant. Iraq's finance minister, Ali Allawi, estimates that about half of
all the profits from oil smuggling are being used to fund the insurgency.
Rebels divert tanker trucks almost as soon as they leave loading terminals.
Drivers who don't cooperate are shot.

Iraq's petroleum spoils are even fracturing the U.S.-supported government. In
oil capital Basra, scores of people have been slaughtered in political turf
wars over oil revenue. The governor's Fadilah party and at least some police
are said to be involved. Much of the new construction visible in the dog-eared
city is the garish mansions of oil warlords.

"The interfactional fighting over oil is getting worse, not better," said
Jamal Qureshi, an oil analyst at PFC Energy in Washington, an energy
consulting firm. "I continue to pencil in declines in Iraqi output for the
next couple of years. This isn't pessimism. It's a real mess."

***

By contrast, life seemed to be looking up at the corner of Illinois Highway 25
and Middle Street.

Michelle Vargo began appearing at the Marathon station with newly curled hair
and fresh nail polish. She even began calling the sullen cigarette salesmen
"Sweetheart."

"Roy's proposed," she confessed, grinning. "We're gonna get hitched in June."
Roy Draino had shown up at the station spit-polished and self-conscious in a
black leather jacket. Appropriately, plastic Valentine's Day hearts decorated
the convenience store.

He poked at the pink stuffed monkeys that screeched "Hoo-hoo-hoo" when
touched, one of the gas station's selection of romantic gifts. Then, he never
returned.

Draino had a run-in with the law, Vargo explained later. He was arrested while
driving on a revoked license. For now, the wedding was off.

Her fingernail polish grew chipped. She closed her office door more often. And
the store profits flat-lined. The Iraqi crude molecules wafted from the
station's nozzles for about five days, and finally disappeared.

***

Mazin Yousif wanted a break from war. So two bodyguards with AK-47s
accompanied him to Basra's sandbagged airport.

He careened past buildings plastered with the dour visage of the late
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the patriarch of Iran's Islamist revolution and a
popular figure among Iraqi Shiites. Yousif slipped by tanker trucks, British
tanks and beggar widows who lunged suicidally at passing traffic, gnarled
hands outstretched. Gray-suited Chinese oil company workers crowded the
departure terminal. (They were combatants of a sort too: the risk-tolerant
vanguard of Beijing's increasingly urgent quest for petroleum.)

"If I had lost faith in Iraq, I wouldn't be here anymore," Yousif said,
boarding a flight to Sharjah, one of the glistening commercial capitals of the
United Arab Emirates. "I'm waiting to see what happens with the new
government. If things don't improve, I will leave--go someplace else."

But where that could be is hard to imagine.

Though deeply alienated by the war, Yousif is as Iraqi as the white cattle
egrets that flock in the dry fields around Basra. His bearing, his worldview,
his history, even his shiny brown business suit betrayed his nationality upon
landing. At Sharjah, his pride could barely endure the minutes-long inspection
of his passport at immigration. Scowling, the lieutenant colonel in him
bristled.

An hour later he rang a doorbell in a modern skyscraper. His daughters and
wife bounded happily out.

"So where's my gift?" demanded Souhira "So So" Yousif, his sassy youngest
daughter and his pet. "No gift?"

"I am your gift," Mazin retorted.

"That's not good enough!"

"You see, she doesn't love me," Mazin said, beaming. "She loves my wallet."

"No, I love you both!"

It was a good act.

But So So, in her mall-rat jeans and T-shirt, was receding from the aging
soldier even as he hugged her. Neither of his daughters, Suad Yousif would
tell her husband later, wanted to return to Iraq.

***

Cruz Rodriguez held a reunion of his own.

After weeks of exchanging phone calls and e-mails, the Marathon clerk and his
runaway brother finally agreed to meet, for the first time since 1990, at a
shopping mall. The brother, a half-sibling by a different father, was wary.
Family life had been bruising. (Rodriguez described his parents' early years
as "serious partying.") But the rapport between the two men was immediate and
warm.

Rodriguez's brother was an engineer in his 30s. He brought snapshots of his
wife and kids. Rodriguez owned no photo album but spoke of his troubled years
with the Gangster Disciples gang.

"He wants to take it slow," Rodriguez said back at the gas station. "He still
don't want to see my dad." To Rodriguez, the meeting was another sign, like
his red Jeep, of a new phase opening in his life. He threw himself into extra
chores at work, like cleaning the security camera lenses. Also, he began
dating Kelly Hanson, the other night clerk, declaring the two wanted to do
"something good with our lives."

In the meantime, the gasoline flowed. One customer showed up to buy gas in a
bathrobe and slippers. Another, a hungry-looking senior, hauled in a plastic
bag full of Kennedy half dollars--55 of them--for a fill-up. A businessman in
a BMW, hearing that a fraction of his tankful originated in Iraq, snorted, "In
that case, it should be free."

Fuel from yet another global hot-spot already was making its way toward the
station. It came on the heels of a blizzard that marooned South Elgin in an
antique stillness, emptying the streets of all sound and movement.

For a few hours, Highway 25 reverted to the dark, glacier-scraped steppe it
once had been. But then the plows broke through. And the cars groped their way
back, once again, to the Marathon.

Chapter 4: Last call

Mike Trager doesn't seem like the sort of guy who shapes the destiny of
nations.

A modest, easygoing man with a fondness for ice hockey and plaid hunting
jackets, Trager works for A#1 Cab in suburban Elgin. His kidneys were
surgically removed two years earlier after a massive heart attack, and he
liked to joke that, without those organs, he was custom-designed for cab
driving: He could sip beverages all day long and never make a pit stop. He
survived on dialysis.

One Friday at 11:30 a.m., Trager stopped by the Marathon station. He was a
regular. He pumped $38 worth of gas into his taxi mini-van. Then he shuffled,
as usual, into the convenience store for a cold drink. Later, parked on the
concrete banks of the Fox River, he settled into his 12-hour shift by watching
the gamblers leaving Elgin's riverboat casino.

"The idea," Trager, 41, said a little dreamily, "is to find a big winner who
wants to drive around." But that didn't happen. Instead, his radio crackled,
and a terse voice ordered him to pick up a fare at the public-aid office. His
take: $3.20, no tip. He smiled wanly, shaking his head. He seemed used to
disappointment.

Trager couldn't defy the A#1 dispatcher, but he had, in his own way, already
influenced the course of global events that day: Buying gasoline in America
does this. No other commodity wields such enormous, hidden power.

With his purchase, for instance, Trager helped prop up one of the last leftist
regimes in the world. His money also made a bunch of impoverished Indians
happy. But to understand how, you must first hail another cab, only this time
2,500 miles south--in Caracas, Venezuela.

Taxis in Venezuela come cheap. Gas in the oil-flush Caribbean nation sells for
14 cents a gallon. For less than $150, a driver narcotized by a collection of
John Denver CDs will transport you six long hours into the country's parched
hinterlands, to a faded oil town called Anaco. There you must swap your cab
for a high-clearance truck. Another hour's journey across an arid savanna will
bring you to your final destination, the Kariqa Indian village of Mapiricure.

According to Marathon refinery experts and Venezuelan energy analysts,
Mapiricure was a minor source of Trager's fill-up. About 5 percent of his
midgrade fuel originated in the oil and natural gas wells surrounding the tiny
native community. And thanks to the grandiose populist agenda of President
Hugo Chavez, the cabbie--and untold thousands of other U.S. oil consumers--was
bankrolling an Indian renaissance.

The Kariqas of eastern Venezuela haven't always enjoyed oil wealth. That prize
was a long time coming. Americans wildcatted the region's first wells 60 years
ago, but in a familiar pattern of indigenous exploitation, few royalties ever
trickled down. Today, under Chavez, they have good oil field jobs, freshly
painted shacks, a new preschool, free medical care, subsidized food, and such
diverse oil-funded ventures as a tribal chicken farm and a trucking
cooperative. Many were buying their first cars. Indeed, the tribe of
self-described Marxists appeared to have a weakness for old Yankee gas
guzzlers like Ford LTDs and Gran Torinos.

Not that they were especially thankful, however, for the likes of Trager. "Our
oil is being sold in Chicago?" said a crusty village elder, Ramon Barroso,
clearly put off by the idea. "Too bad. Nobody here wants to feed the empire of
that criminal George Bush."

Barroso was at that moment leading an impromptu tour of some nearby oil wells.
He wore a T-shirt that declared, in Spanish, "Resistance Against Landlords."
Another Indian was practicing firing a bow and arrow across the well pad. He
fired and retrieved the same arrow many times. Apparently, it was the only one
he had.

***

Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration's senior diplomat, recently bemoaned
oil's unsavory effect on foreign affairs.

"I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as secretary of
state than the way that the politics of energy is--I will use the word
'warping' diplomacy around the world," Rice told Congress in April. "It has
given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very
good ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very
little power."

Coming from a former Chevron board member, Rice's shock is puzzling. After
all, King Oil has been meddling in the plans of nations for a century--at
least since Winston Churchill switched the Royal Navy's fuel supply from coal
to crude, thus elevating oil's importance in building global empires.

In the decades since, oil has molded war plans. (Hundreds of thousands
perished in World War II offensives launched to capture oil supplies.) It has
lubricated alliances. (Washington and Riyadh.) It has trumped ideology. (In
the Cold War, Cuban troops guarded U.S. oil facilities in communist
Angola--the crude was simply that valuable.) And it has spawned toxic ironies.
(Americans' oil addiction, it's now widely agreed, helps fund both sides in
the war on terror by enriching fundamentalist Islamic regimes.)

Yet today, with uncertainty spreading about the world's crude output, many
experts fear that energy wars will become the defining struggles of the early
21st Century. Already, the international scramble for oil has grown more
twisted than ever.

A case in point: the bizarre marriage of convenience between the United States
and Venezuela.

Were it not for its mammoth oil reserves, Venezuela would probably languish on
Rice's blacklist of "outposts of tyranny," along with the likes of Zimbabwe
and Cuba. Chavez has outraged the Bush administration for years, using his
huge oil income--estimated at $150 million a day--to rekindle a leftist
movement in Latin America. Chavez also has lavished billions in aid on his
neighbors, currying favor in the region.

Last winter, he gave away millions of dollars worth of heating oil to
grateful, low-income Americans, thus embarrassing the White House. And just
this month, as part of his "anti-imperialist" agenda, Chavez announced plans
to cut off gas sales to 1,800 independently owned Citgo stations in the U.S.
Citgo is owned by the Venezuelan government.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once shrilly compared Chavez's authoritarian
style to that of Hitler. And Chavez has blasted back by expelling U.S.
military attaches, raising taxes on U.S. oil companies, and pointedly favoring
the Chinese and even the Iranians to tap new reservoirs. He also taunts Bush
as a "mass murderer," a "drunkard" and a "donkey."

Through it all, American motorists continue to chug most of Venezuela's
petroleum output of 3 million barrels a day. Roughly half of Chavez's
government budget is funded by sales to the U.S.

"Imagine a dysfunctional couple," said Venezuelan energy analyst Alberto
Quiros. "They scream and throw things but are still chained together by their
mutual oil dependency. It's crazy."

A small link of that chain of co-dependency was anchored in late November off
the docks of Venezuela's coastal Jose refining complex. It was an oil tanker
called the Stena Italica, loading "natural gasoline"--an unprocessed
distillate found in oil and gas fields--destined for the U.S. oil port of
Texas City, Texas.

Some of that liquid energy ended up in Trager's gas tank. And a small part of
it came from under the worn boots of a South American Indian who pries the
caps off beers with his powerful, work-calloused hands to toast Hugo Chavez.

***

Ramon Barroso believes the Americans are going to invade Venezuela from outer
space. He heard this on the radio.

"The Yanquis will attack from the cosmos, because our borders are
well-defended by patriots," Barroso said earnestly. "This will be the
beginning of World War III."

A talkative, sun-wrinkled man in his late 40s, Barroso was toiling in a field
with some 20 other Kariqa Indians, harvesting bitter yucca, the tribe's
potato-like staple. It was dirty work. Barroso had torched the plot earlier to
drive away rattlesnakes, and ash was everywhere. Aside from the sweaty field
hands and a couple of rooftops glinting through a distant windbreak, the
yellow plains extending to all horizons seemed devoid of life. It was hard to
imagine anyone invading Mapiricure.

The Kariqas' story is the tale of all Native Americans in miniature. One of
the first indigenous people encountered by Christopher Columbus, the tribe was
feared for its belligerence; it fought the Spanish for more than two centuries
before being herded onto desolate scrublands infested with insects.
(Mapiricure, population about 400, means "Place of the Mosquitoes.") Since
then, their numbers have plummeted through assimilation. They have lost most
of their tribal lands to scheming cattle barons. And so poor are their fields
that the ragged Indian farmers ended up digging holes and selling their soil
as sand.

That's when an unlikely savior by the name of PDVSA showed up.

Oil companies are not usually in the business of altruism, but Petroleos de
Venezuela S.A., the state energy firm known by its abbreviation, PDVSA, isn't
your usual oil giant.

Dismantled by Chavez after a crippling worker strike in late 2002 and early
2003, PDVSA has been reborn as the central engine of Chavez's socialist
revolution. The strongman fired 19,000 employees and replaced them with party
loyalists. And now the company is spending $8 billion of its annual profits on
social programs: a staggering $310 worth of assistance for every man, woman
and child in Venezuela.

"This is a good way to run an oil company into the ground," said a skeptical
Michelle Billig, an analyst with PIRA Energy Group in Washington. "On the
other hand, if leaders in places like Nigeria, Angola and even Iraq ever tried
a bit of this, we probably wouldn't be hearing so much about instability in
their countries."

PDVSA's insignia is a substitute flag in the oil zones. The company's
red-blue-and-yellow logo appears on baseball caps, T-shirts, walls, cars,
billboards, clinic entrances and TV commercials. In backwaters like
Mapiricure, the company is the only institution that actually works. It bought
villagers a school bus, sponsors scholarships, pays for eyeglasses and funds a
program to rescue the Indians' fading language. About the only items lacking
PDVSA's distinctive emblem in Mapiricure are the sleepy donkeys.

"We're in our hour of glory," concluded Angel Cedeqo, the manager of the local
oil-subsidized food store. "We can eat more than iguanas."

It was night on the savanna. Villagers swayed in hand-woven hammocks strung on
their hut verandas. Cedeqo sat with Barroso, the garrulous village elder, who
was still smudged with ash. (The unprofitable yucca harvest was oil-subsidized
too.) Both men recalled how, in the past, Venezuela's politicians discovered
remote Mapiricure only once a year--on election day.

"They'd show up with trucks full of rum," Barroso said, laughing. "We'd get
drunk as fish in water. Then they'd drive us into town to vote, and we'd wake
up the next day like animals in the gutters."

***

Cheap booze kept Mike Trager rolling.

Perhaps half of his pickups were at neighborhood bars like Carol's Place or
Diamond Jims or The Martini Room.

"We move a lot of people around who are loaded," Trager said, steering his van
to his third bar call of the day. "They lose their licenses, and we get them
home. There are hundreds of them in my zone."

Cheap gas also helped. It makes suburban bus service pointless. The strange
upshot: Though he zips by $1.5 million homes and fancy malls, most of Trager's
fares are working-class drinkers, eccentrics and seniors--a carless underclass
navigating suburbia in expensive cabs.

There was "Hillbilly," an Elgin barfly who once fell off a bridge and was
fished, drunk, out of the Fox River. There was "Talking Lady," a retiree
Trager frequently took shopping. She stepped into his cab in midsentence and
still was chattering when Trager closed her apartment door. And then there was
"49er."

"I spend $250 a week on taxis," he said, climbing into the cab at a lumberyard
in the booming exurb of Gilberts. "That's a lot of beer."

He is a burly construction laborer with hands like chopping blocks and a
brushy black beard. He wore muddy jeans tucked into his boot-tops and a
sombrero clamped down on his head. He resembled a crazed refugee from the Gold
Rush.

"Why worry about oil?" he retorted when Trager broached the topic of gas
prices. "Canada's got them in tar sands, right? There's enough energy up there
to last us lifetimes. We can say adios to Saudi Arabia."

A few minutes later the big man started speaking to himself in high-pitched
cartoon voices. Then he asked Trager to stop at a liquor store, where he
bought 6 pints of gin.

***

Venezuela may harbor the richest oil prize on the planet.

Some geologists believe the Orinoco Belt, an ancient layer of sand buried
under the country's swampy eastern plains, holds up to 300 billion barrels of
recoverable crude. That's another Saudi Arabia.

To peak oil skeptics, this gargantuan deposit, which the U.S. Geological
Survey giddily calls "the largest single hydrocarbon accumulation in the
world," alleviates fears of declining crude supplies for decades. To Hugo
Chavez it's the ultimate political carrot--and club.

"The oil from the belt won't be for Mr. Danger," Chavez declared in a
typically pugnacious speech last year, referring to Bush with a pet insult.
"In the first place oil will be for the Venezuelan people, and then the people
of Latin America and the Caribbean."

Trouble is, almost all of the crude is "gunk"--jet-black tars that are
difficult to extract from the ground and expensive to process. Canada also
possesses enormous reserves of this sticky, molasses-like substance. And while
heavy oils are indeed being looked at closely--along with crop-based
ethanols--as a sort of last call for hydrocarbons, uncertainties still dog
their viability as alternative fuels.

In Canada, for instance, oil companies must use huge volumes of valuable fresh
water to steam-blast the syrupy goo out of the ground. The landscape is
strip-mined. And the fuel needed to heat the steam, Canada's once-abundant
natural gas supply, has already peaked. Now tar-sands companies are talking of
building nuclear plants nearby to help power the oil mining effort.

"People like to think technology will always rescue them," said Rep. Roscoe
Bartlett (R-Md.), a senior member of the House Science Committee. "But if it
still ends up taking two barrels [worth of oil energy] to pump a barrel out of
ground, you're in a losing game."

Heavy crudes might help delay a global peak oil crisis, Bartlett added, but
not for long. He noted that even with a fast-track program, Canada might
squeeze 5 million barrels a day from its tar sands by 2025. But by then, the
world's daily oil appetite may have swollen by 40 million barrels.

In Venezuela, there are other imponderables. Like a new cold war in the
making.

***

Ramon Barroso wanted to show how revolutionaries stick together. So he jumped
into a dented-up Ford F-100 pickup, loaded its bed with a passel of village
kids and drove over the lumpy plains to an orchard outside Mapiricure.

The young trees were cashews. And they were dying, their leaves curling in the
hot prairie winds. But that didn't concern Barroso. He was interested in
symbols.

"Our Chinese comrades planted this for us," he said proudly, referring to the
China National Petroleum Corporation, which maintains the surrounding oil
fields. "It's a gift from our brothers in Beijing."

Or rather a set piece for today's untenable oil politics: As it turned out,
Mike Trager obtained his gas fix not only from a hostile government that
recently bought 100,000 Russian assault rifles to defend itself from an
imagined U.S. invasion, but his fuel came from a remote oil patch serviced by
his nation's biggest energy-consuming rivals, the Chinese.

"America and China are on a collision course over what remains of the world's
hydrocarbons," said Gal Luft, a China expert with the Institute for the
Analysis of Global Security in Washington. "The 21st Century is going to be
defined by this aggressive competition for a resource that's depleting."

Cushioned for the moment in their oil-soaked lifestyle, most Americans have
little idea how surging energy demand in China is reshaping the future, Luft
said.

Optimists see opportunities for cooperation. With China's richest billionaire
a solar energy mogul and Beijing's zeal to convert coal to liquid fuels, the
country may actually help pull the rest of the world into a post-oil economy.

But in the short term, most experts see an ominous energy cold war shaping up.

China's gross domestic product is growing at 10 percent, and its car fleet is
expected to outnumber America's by 2030. Its budding oil appetite already has
helped push crude prices to historic highs. Scouring the world for oil,
Chinese companies have plucked the low-hanging fruit: smaller African
petro-states and pariah nations like Iran. Now they're moving into traditional
U.S. energy turf: Canada, the Middle East and Latin America.

The single-mindedness of its quest can be unsettling. In Sudan, one Chinese
contractor worked almost around the clock, erecting a 1,000-mile export
pipeline in just 11 months. According to the Sudanese government, the workers
who died on the job were simply cremated on the spot.

In Venezuela, Chavez is pushing hard to make 1.3 billion Chinese his main
customers. This year he hopes to double oil exports to Beijing to 300,000
barrels a day. Chinese rig operators in rough haircuts and blue coveralls
stride about oil towns like Anaco, popping into Chinese restaurants that have
mushroomed since the late 1990s.

In backwater Mapiricure, Chinese engineers show up in white SUVs to inspect
the latest pipeline leaks. So far the spills have been minor. The Kariqas poke
sticks into the crude puddled around the wellheads and keep their peace.
Nobody wants to disrupt Venezuela's tar-colored gravy train.

"We'll support Chavez until he behaves badly, then we'll kick him out," said
Cedeqo, the village store owner. "Right now, he's looking out for us."

The sun was setting.

A boy rode a horse down the three-block main street. Bats flicked through the
mango trees. And a small crowd gathered on Cedeqo's porch for a weekly ritual:
the reading of Chavez's 1999 populist constitution. PDVSA, the national oil
company, sponsors the readings through its ubiquitous social programs.

Alcides Barroso, a scarred oil worker and Ramon's older brother, did the
honors.

"Let's go straight to the articles on Indian land rights," Alcides said with
relish, wearing his wife's reading glasses. A 40-watt light bulb burned
overhead and moths swarmed like electrons. He read laboriously, reverently,
into the night, stumbling over words such as "unalienable." Nobody stirred.

Given the long Indian history with treaties, the scene was hard to watch. The
faith seemed misplaced. Like it did at the opposite end of the energy trail in
South Elgin, another oil-based utopia.

***

Michelle Vargo finally left the South Elgin Marathon.

The heart and soul of the gas station, she'd had enough. Prairie State
Enterprises, the station's owner, was unhappy with the low profit margins. But
they valued her ability to train new staff. So they transferred her 19 miles
away to a new Marathon in Aurora--the latest addition to the 127,000 homely
energy outlets that keep America's wheeled civilization alive.

"I'm a half-hour closer to home," Vargo said with a sigh. "At least now my
fuel bills won't drag me down."

She was at a modest turning point in her manic life. Pressed for money, she
had sent one of her daughters to live with her loathed ex. She gave away her
pet iguana to a bar. She even traded in her big Suburban for a zippy 2005
Mustang, gaining her a few extra miles per gallon. But she remains constant to
Roy Draino. The crusty furnace cleaner and his gas station bride finally
married in a public park in Lockport.

Marta Perez, the loyal South Elgin Marathon clerk, didn't quit when Vargo
left. She needed the job. As for night clerk Cruz Rodriguez, he was later
arrested on charges of beating fellow employee and girlfriend Kelly Hanson.
("He got the worst of it," she said brassily.) He sold his gas-gulping Jeep to
pay attorney's bills. His long-anticipated reconciliation with his brother
stalled.

All the while at the South Elgin Marathon, the tanker trucks come and go,
disgorging their liquid tales into the ground. There was more Qua Iboe but no
Basrah Light. There was a steady flow of Louisiana crudes and only a trickle
of Sahara Blend from Algeria. As usual, the fuel's stories went unheard. They
were expelled from countless tailpipes. And if peak oil theorists are right,
and the Marathon survives its 35-year structural life span, then it will be
among the last filling stations dispensing gasoline in the world.

"I really think the president should do something about this gas problem,"
cabbie Mike Trager said. But he couldn't suggest what.

He burned his Venezuelan molecules until midnight, picking up more drunks, a
Bible college student, a professional chef, a kid whose knuckles were bandaged
as if from a fistfight, a bartender, an elegantly dressed woman who took him
all the beautiful way to Vernon Hills--26 miles, $88 with the tip.

"So," he asked them all, "where we goin'?"

*
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