Unsheik; the coming obsolescence of oil.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of Newsweek, The Atlantic, and The Washington Monthly.

* The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Daniel Yergin. Simon & Schuster, $27.50.

I've got 20 bucks that says: One hundred years from now, petroleum will be worthless. Historically, many of the commodities that held dominant and seemingly indelible positions in world commerce during one century became afterthoughts to the century that followed. Bronze, salt, tea, dyes, cotton, coal, and rubber are among the items it once seemed humanity could not live without. Why did they fade? When a substance holds great value, there is enormous incentive to discover substitutes or invent alternatives. Petroleum, essential to world economies today, will fall to this progression in its turn, replaced by new fuels such as methane and pure hydrogen, or whole new philosophies toward energy, such as collecting it from sunlight in space. That's why the Saudis are smart to be selling oil as fast as they can pump the stuff, rather than conserving it for their grandchildren. As the sands drift back over the Persian Gulf berms, future desert dwellers may be annoyed that their forefathers didn't sell even more when they had the chance.

But that is the shape of things to come. The shape of things in this, the century of oil, is the subject of Daniel Yergin's excellent book,* the timeliest work of nonfiction in many years. The Prize is a book of great depth, texture, and length, coming in at 781 pages, not counting afterwords and notes. This work should fare well in many award competitions.

Structurally, The Prize reads like the effort of a historian. Although the author is best known as an energy analyst who makes his living selling reports to corporate clients through a consultancy called Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Yergin also has an academic background as a lecturer at Harvard. He first came to the public eye during the gas crisis years as coauthor of Energy Future, a compendium of gloomy projections that has not weathered well; but then practically everybody was snookered by the seventies conventional wisdom that we would soon freeze in the dark. Today, the output of Cambridge Associates deals mainly with routine matters like oil price and shipment trends, the old $64,000 question of whether oil is running out no longer engaging much interest.

Oil uber alles

As a work of history, The Prize is extraordinary and highly admirable. Like most...