The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century
By Tom Bower
HarperPress £20, 448 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

The Squeeze begins with a bang: the sound of Tom Bower blowing a hole in his own credibility. In only the second paragraph of the preface, he suggests a shaky grasp of the workings of oil markets and of Opec, the producers’ cartel, and fails dismally in an attempt to get inside the head of Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s veteran oil minister.

It is a testament to Bower’s journalistic skills, and to the great story he has to tell, that he manages to steady the ship after torpedoing it so early in the journey. For the most part, The Squeeze is a gripping and convincing account of the turbulent story of the global oil industry over the past decade.

Daniel Yergin’s dazzling book The Prize remains the definitive history of oil in the 20th century. But while the world waits for Yergin to pen a sequel, Bower has stepped in smartly to fill the gap.

The events he covers are scarcely less dramatic than those described in The Prize , including the ascent of the oil price to record highs, the power grab by leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez, and the downfall of corporate chiefs such as Lord Browne of BP and Sir Philip Watts of Shell . Bower’s book has the advantage of being scorchingly topical.

Think of the most important events in the global oil business of the past couple of months: BP’s giant oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico; ExxonMobil’s troubled attempt to take a $4bn stake in a big field off the coast of Ghana; and Citigroup’s sale of Phibro, its commodities unit, to Occidental Petroleum. For all of them, The Squeeze provides the fascinating story behind the headlines.

A former reporter for the BBC’s Panorama programme and a celebrated chronicler of wickedness and folly in previous books on ­Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, among others, Bower has found no such targets in the oil business. His treatment of the reserves misreporting scandal at Shell, which was exposed in 2004 and cost Watts his job, is remarkably fair-minded.

Lee Raymond, former chairman of Exxon, is one possible contender for the role of the book’s bad guy, but even he is guilty of no more than iron-clad self-confidence and a blinkered focus on making money for his shareholders.

Indeed, an unlikely hero emerges in the shape of Lord Browne, who left BP in disgrace in May 2007 with both his competence and his integrity under question. Bower is no apologist for Lord Browne; “slightly-built [and] soft-spoken” are probably the kindest epithets he uses. He is unsparing in his assessment of the chief executive’s contribution to a culture at BP that put an inadequate emphasis on safety, highlighted after a 2005 explosion at the Texas City refinery in the US, which killed 15. However, time and again Lord Browne’s strategic vision and tactical ruthlessness are shown to be critical in securing advantageous positions for BP in the US, Russia and Azerbaijan.

In that, as in much else, Bower’s judgment is spot on. He is particularly good on the mechanics of modern computer-assisted oil exploration, a gambling game where the chips come in the form of $100m wells. There is also an amusingly perceptive depiction of the difference in culture between Exxon, where the uniformly white-shirted executives are “akin to the Stepford wives”, and BP, which was “founded on disobedience and survived by maverick deeds”.

Apart from the cartoonish view of Ali Naimi, there are other slips that speak of poor editing. Saudi Arabia’s giant Ghawar is an oil field, not a well; Carol Browner, not Browning, was the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton.

But overall, The Squeeze provides a first-rate account of where the oil industry is now, and some useful pointers as to where it is going.

For the paperback, though, it would be wise to lose the preface.

Ed Crooks is the FT’s energy editor