Crude oil begins, in this film's telling, some 160 million years ago as marine organisms settling into ancient seabeds, long before it becomes the substance running the modern world. Australian filmmaker Richard Smith traces that transformation across eleven countries and five continents, moving from oil fields and refineries to the laboratories of geologists and economists who explain how organic matter under heat and pressure turns into the fuel behind electricity grids, plastics, and global shipping. The film follows the carbon cycle as closely as it follows the industry, using scientists to connect geology to economics to climate, showing how a substance formed over geological time gets extracted and burned on a human timescale of decades. Interviews build the case for why that mismatch matters, linking oil supply and consumption directly to the buildup of atmospheric carbon. Rather than treating oil as a headline about prices or politics, the film treats it as a physical object with an origin story, and asks what happens as that story runs out.