This book will be a joy to the common citizen that is tired of the lies, politics, and misinformation that drives the petroleum industry. It opens with the question, "what would you do if you ran a business and agents remote from your control that said things and did things that drove up the value of your product?" The answer of course is that the petroleum industry will not challenge misrepresentations that improve their profits. The book is written for the novice in order to uncover the mysteries behind petroleum origin, world production, price impact factors, emerging shale gas, fracking, and tar sands. Future sources are also described such as oil shale and clean coal conversion to liquid fuel by use of the Fischer-Tropsch process. The book explains that five sources of petroleum with synthetic alternatives are what the United States needs to be independent from foreign sources. But the next petroleum frontier of the near future is massive methane hydrate deposits that exist in the deep offshore around the margins of all continents and at shallower depths in the Arctic. Japan could be a petroleum exporter within the next decade because of the potential of indigenous methane hydrate deposits. A summary of petroleum history is provided beginning with its discovery in the Persian Gulf region early in the 20th Century through to the Oil Price Bubble of 2008, and the potential for renewable energy sources. Supply-demand dynamics are examined with a simple behavior model that explains how collective human response to news events can create supply shortages. The goal of the environmental establishment to lead us toward energy serfdom in spite of the fact we have plenty of petroleum and synthetic alternatives long into the future. In summary, the book explains that this planet is blessed with immense petroleum resources and for too much of the past century we've been paying too much for it.