As I worked through the outline, though, it seemed like one idea too many. Instead of enhancing the story, it kind of muddled it and was leading me into an 800-page epic that I didn’t want to write and you probably wouldn’t want to read. In the end, I decided the Israel angle was enough. My scheme to wipe out the Middle East’s oil went into the dreaded ‘deleted’ folder, never to be seen again.

Or so I thought. I just couldn’t completely shake the idea and the more it festered in the back of my mind, the more entrenched it became.

The ramifications of America’s dependence on oil are so much more dire than you’d realize from casual thought. When I first considered the scenario, I figured a serious drop in oil availability would be a nightmare, but a more or less manageable one. Deeper thought brought up some disturbing questions. How would I feed myself? I’m not a farmer–I rely entirely on the trucks that stock our local grocery store. What if the shelves of that store were suddenly empty? The obvious answer is that I’d drive to a more distant store. But what if there was no gas to fill my tank? The more I thought about it, the easier it became to picture a cascade effect that would descend the country into violence and anarchy.

Initially, the problem with the idea was that I didn’t think there was anything that could cause this kind of a sudden, catastrophic shortage. Oil is pretty resilient and the supply is reasonably diversified.

Enter bacterial contamination.

I had never really heard of hydrocarbon-eating bacteria before I started my research, but not only do they exist, they’re actually pretty common and pose a constant threat to drilling operations. Quickly the scenario went from ridiculously implausible to frighteningly simple…