article: When we flick the light switch or kettle, ancient plant and animal material, that formed hundreds of millions of years ago, are consumed in an instant. The ancient geological past is powering the present, but for how much longer? How ironic that our modern world is so hopelessly wedded to a substance that began life tens of millions of years ago. And yet it is the liberation of that fossil solar energy tens of millions of years later that transformed the planet and redefined us as a species. It is that transformation that I'm fascinated by and why I wanted to make this three-part series about our addiction to crude and to help me answer a fundamental question. When did planet Earth become Planet Oil? It's a series that's also been a personal journey. My childhood and teenage years were spent oblivious to the stunning advances in petroleum science and technology that evolved furiously to exploit the buried bonanza off our shores. I was born in November 1964. A huge gas field had been discovered off the coast of Holland a few years earlier and geologists soon worked out that the very same hydrocarbon-bearing rocks ran all the way to the British coast. By December 1964, the race was on to find oil and gas in the British sector of the North Sea. The well drilled that winter was dry. But the following year, the Sea Gem drilling platform hit pay dirt, or rather natural gas. The euphoria was short lived after disaster struck on Boxing Day 1965, with 14 men losing their lives. It was an inauspicious start of what would become an engineering revolution that turned the UK's energy fortunes around. By the time I was starting primary school, attention had shifted to the deeper waters northeast of Aberdeen and the first oil fields had been found - Brent and Forties - so-called "giant" fields that rivalled those of the Middle East. My school days were punctuated by evening news footage of the latest platform being dragged out of yards and off to the wilds of the North Sea. As a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 20-year-old geology student, my subject always seemed to be in the news. During the early 80s, Margaret Thatcher was at war with coal, or rather Britain's miners. Thatcher had vowed the UK's coal supply would never again be held to ransom by the National Union of Mineworkers and I remember at the time, it was like watching a fight to the death. British governments had been here before, during the 1970s, but this time the balance of power had shifted. Britain was no longer dependent on British Coal or the workers who mined it. Thatcher's pledge to build more oil and gas-fired power stations helped put an end to both the strike and many of the mines that had fed the UK's insatiable appetite for coal for more than a century. And the prime minister's promise was made in the knowledge Britain was for the first time in decades, energy secure - because the UK now
summary: The truth is that most people have no inkling of the world that lies beneath their feet, or where the bulk of their current energy fix comes from.