Modern Petroleum: A Basic Primer of the Industry — Bill D. Berger & Kenneth E. Anderson

Published in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1978, Modern Petroleum was designed to explain the enormous technological system behind petroleum to both technical and nontechnical readers.

Bill D. Berger and Kenneth E. Anderson follow petroleum through the interconnected processes of geology, exploration, drilling, production, transportation, refining and distribution. Diagrams and illustrations turn an industry normally divided among specialized engineering disciplines into a single visual story of how hydrocarbons moved from underground deposits into the infrastructure of twentieth-century society.

The timing makes this edition particularly interesting as a historical artifact. Published only a few years after the 1973 oil crisis and during a period of intense concern over energy supply, it documents how the petroleum industry presented its technology and operations near the end of the 1970s. The book remained sufficiently useful to be revised repeatedly; a second edition appeared in 1981 and a substantially expanded third edition in 1992.

Seen nearly half a century later, however, the title Modern Petroleum has acquired an unintended historical quality. The infrastructure depicted as modern and expanding in these pages became part of the fossil-fuel system whose enormous climatic consequences define one of today's central scientific and technological challenges. This copy therefore works particularly well as a primary-source artifact of how the petroleum age understood itself.

Details: Bill D. Berger and Kenneth E. Anderson. The Petroleum Publishing Company / Oil & Gas Journal, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Copyright 1978. ISBN 0-87814-081-6. 293 pages. Illustrated hardcover.

Condition: Good vintage condition with expected shelf wear. Former institutional copy with handwritten classification and an Amoco Production Company ownership stamp. See photographs for condition and markings.