This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on April 9th, 2026 titled, “Oil 101: What You Actually Need to Know About Oil.”
As a result of the Strait of Hormuz closure, you’ve probably heard a lot about oil in the news lately, but you might not be sure why the situation is such a big deal. The answer lies in the fact that our entire modern civilization is only possible because of oil. The following series outlines a way of seeing oil from a systems perspective, and my hope is that it might help contextualize the massive historical moment we are witnessing unfold today.
This will be the first of three essays on the subject. In this one, we’ll cover the basics of oil – what it is and how it benefits society. These are things we should have been taught in school, but weren’t. The second essay will expand to look at how our systems and institutions depend on oil, and how this knowledge can help us understand our present moment. The last essay will widen the lens of the first two and help us explore what all of this means for the future of humanity and the Earth.
How Oil Was Formed
Let’s first start with the basics: what is oil, really?
Most people’s mental image of oil comes from a cartoon of dead dinosaurs turning into goo. In reality, oil formed from dead marine phytoplankton and algae that captured solar energy tens of millions of years ago. They were compressed by heat and pressure over geological time, creating a super energy-dense liquid substance. It’s a solar battery that took millions of years to charge, and we are draining it in centuries. Coal and natural gas are a similar story.
The Power in a Barrel of Oil
So how much work does this ancient sunlight actually do for us?
A barrel of oil replaces around five years of human labor for about $100 (as of writing this at least). A single barrel contains roughly 1,700 kilowatt hours of work potential, while a healthy human doing physical work generates about 0.6 kilowatt hours per day. Depending on how strong a person is, what the task is, how many hours a day they work, and how efficient they are, anywhere from 1 to 20 years of human labor is replaced when a barrel of oil is combined with machines. So for the average human, five years is a solid approximation. This powerful economic subsidy is indistinguishable from magic on human time scales.
Here’s a way to feel this: the next time you drive your car somewhere, imagine running out of gas and pushing it home, even with three or four friends. A gallon of gasoline that costs you $4 would take you and your buddies weeks to replace with human muscle – and would be pretty unpleasant in the process. We never think about this. We just swipe the credit card and go places, and all we pay for is the cost of pulling the oil out of the ground – not the millions of years it took to create it or the environmental cost of burning it. This makes oil absurdly cheap relative to the work it performs.
Economic textbooks and business classes teach that energy’s contribution is its dollar price tag – in effect saying that oil’s cost share is equal to the value it provides. In reality, the cost we pay is orders of magnitude smaller than the value that oil provides for us. Oil is the deepest subsidy in the history of civilization, and it’s mostly invisible…except in energy crises like we are experiencing now.
This is all based on a single 42-gallon barrel of oil. Now multiply it by the total amount we burn every year, and we’ll see what this looks like at scale.
The Fossil Armies of Civilization
Globally, we use about 100 billion barrel-of-oil-equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons per year. At around five years of labor per barrel, this means that we have 500 billion human-labor-equivalents working alongside about five billion actual human workers in our global economy. This equates to 100 fossil-powered ghost workers for every living one.
This giant labor subsidy, when combined with machines, is primarily what underpinned the explosion of ‘wealth’ globally. It boosted corporate profits. It slashed the price of goods and transportation so they can show up at your door the next day in a brown truck. It supercharged agriculture to increase our population from 1 billion to 8 billion, and it dramatically increased per capita consumption on top of that.
Every economic “miracle” of the last 150 years was underwritten by this invisible fossil workforce. But what does this actually look like at the individual level?
Our Real Caloric Consumption
Oil – alongside gas and coal – has made the average person richer than historical royalty. The average American uses roughly 40 barrel-of-oil-equivalents of oil, gas, and coal, while the global average is 10 barrel-of-oil-equivalents per person. That level of energy service surpasses what kings and queens had access to a few centuries ago: hot water on demand, refrigeration, personal travel by car and global travel by plane, year-round fresh food, and climate-controlled sleep. All from ancient sunlight powering research, innovation, infrastructure, factories, transport, supply chains, and commerce… and yet almost no one sees it.
That’s because we swim in energy the way a fish swims in water. Every product, every service, and every bit of GDP first requires an energy conversion. No exceptions. The average American home has about 40 items constantly plugged in, draining power around the clock. We don’t notice because energy has been abundant and growing our entire lives.
We’ve become energy blind.
I got my Masters at the University of Chicago. My Nobel-winning professors never once mentioned the word “energy” as a contributor to economic productivity, because during their lifetimes the supply just kept growing. So they treated this exceptional period of human history as if it were normal.
Here’s one way to feel how energy blind we are: your body needs about 2,000 calories per day to stay alive. But the average American – when you count all the energy consumed on their behalf through heating, transport, manufacturing, food systems, and supply chains – uses roughly 200,000 calories per day. That’s a hundred times more calories than your body requires. Before 9am, most of us wake up in a climate controlled room, flip on the light switch, turn on hot water for a shower, make a coffee, and put on synthetic clothes – all possible because of oil.
We are each living at a metabolic rate that no organism in the history of life on Earth has ever sustained, and almost none of it is visible to us.
Beyond Oil 101
This all sounds like a miraculous gift, and in many ways it is, but here’s the kicker: this ultra-cheap energy in the form of coal, gas, and especially oil will not be available to us forever. It may well be gone sooner than we expect.
We’ll explore this in the next essay on Thursday – part two of our intro trilogy on oil. Thanks for reading.
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And oil may be abiotic, which is widely considered plausible in the oil industry, especially in Russia.
I mostly don't drive during the week, but my caloric use is probably between the world average and US average...
I grow vegetable gardens and ride a bike. It is instructive in the way that this essay is instructive.
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