A CRUDE WORLD
"Oil is the Devil's Excrement"
Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, Minister and co-founder of OPEC, 1973
"You kinda have to go where the oil is"
Lee Raymond, CEO ExxonMobile, 2003
"A crude world" is a behind the scenes investigation of the oil industry. Paolo Woods (photographs), Serge Michel (texts), have been out in the field exploring the new world order of oil. Travelling from the ice-locked platforms of Siberia to the burning deserts of Iraq, from a tycoon’s air-conditioned offices in Houston to the miserable oilfields of Baku, from the endless steppe of Kazakhstan to the shantytowns of Angola, they followed the new pipelines through the lawless valleys of Georgia and shopped with the oligarchs in Dubai.
Covering twelve countries in four continents they focused on areas that are, or will be, the new production hubs and pivotal points in the precarious equilibrium of the oil trade.
Indeed, the world is thirstier than ever for oil and America, the thirstiest of all, no longer trusts Saudi Arabia to quench its crude dependency, so the hunt for new sources is open.
"A crude world" follows the routes of this black gold, revealing dramatic and fascinating stories that are too often left untold.