The cover of Private Empire, Steve Coll's new book about Exxon Mobil Corp., is a forbidding black slab. Even the lettering looks dismal. It's the color of a chain smoker's lung.

Coll's vast narrative is bookended by accounts of man-made disasters. Private Empire opens with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (the captain had been drinking), and closes with the BP Deepwater Horizon nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In between there is much for those who loathe Big Oil generally, and Exxon Mobil specifically, to feast upon.

The company, Coll writes, is "a corporate state within the American state" and "one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism." Some employees call its ominous headquarters near Dallas the Death Star.

Little light, or information, leaks from the Death Star. The company wields "a corporate system of secrecy, nondisclosure agreements, and internal security," Coll writes, "that matched some of the most compartmented black boxes of the world's intelligence agencies." Exxon Mobil's media strategy, an in-house joke declares, is learning to say "no comment" in 50 languages.

Private Empire details Exxon Mobil's harassment of environmental scientists, its messy entanglements in small wars in far-flung countries, its withholding of information from Congress, its dissembling about global warming, its arrogant culture, its obscene stockpiles of cash.

In 2005 it earned a net profit of $36.1 billion, more than any corporation ever. To paraphrase a line from Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 oil movie, There Will Be Blood, Exxon Mobil sticks a straw into, and drinks, many people's milkshakes.

The company is a near-perfect and ready-made villain. When Greenpeace activists climbed to the roof of the Death Star in 2003, its members unfurled a banner that declared the site a global-warming crime scene. Exxon Mobil is not easily pushed around. As President George W. Bush said to the prime minister of India in 2001, "Nobody tells those guys what to do."

Coll is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of books that include The Bin Ladens (2008) and Ghost Wars (2004). His new book, like his previous ones, is a big dig. Mountains of facts are mined, crushed, and consumed as narrative fuel. If Coll were a corporation, you would want to impose a carbon tax on him.

Private Empire is meticulous, multi-angled, and valuable. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, despite all the dark facts I have dumped above, impartial. Coll and his phlegmatic research assistants have interviewed more than 400 people, including Exxon Mobil's longtime chief executive, Lee R. Raymond, a legendarily hard character.

It's among this book's achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world, as often as not, through Exxon Mobil's eyes. The company is portrayed here, some egregious missteps aside, as possessing an honorable if rigid corporate culture that seeks to supply a product (unlike tobacco companies, to which it is often compared) that a functioning society actually must have.

That product takes great effort to acquire. "Unlike Wal-Mart or Google," Coll writes, "the object of Exxon's business model lay buried beneath the earth," often in unstable countries. The company learned, over time, that is was necessary to play Darwinian hardball to survive. "Compromise," Coll writes, "was not the Exxon way."

Coll's dispassionate sentences are his book's great strength and its subacoustic weakness.

He covers an enormous amount of ground. There are intricate assessments of Exxon Mobil's morally complicated operations in countries such as Chad, Indonesia, Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela, and Vladimir V. Putin's Russia. At length Coll dilates on the "resource curse," a phrase for the way that finding oil reserves can make some poor countries go backward instead of forward, like lottery winners on an unhinged binge.

There are accounts of employee kidnappings, and tick-tock financial reporting about events such as Exxon's 1999 merger with Mobil. Coll's prose sweeps the earth like an IMAX camera.

Part of what keeps you reading is Coll's sly and revealing portrait of Raymond, who became Exxon's chief executive a few years after the Valdez spill and ran the company until 2006. He changed it in profound ways, moving its headquarters to Texas from Manhattan and making safety, efficiency, and sheer profitability his hardboiled goals.

Raymond is riveting in his personal unattractiveness. He possesses a prominent harelip from a cleft palate, and "the jowls beneath his chin could billow like a bullfrog's neck," Coll writes. Raymond terrified his employees. His bluntness also inspired them. I'd read a biography of this man in a heartbeat. His standard drink on the company's private jet? A glass of milk with popcorn in it.

With Raymond's retirement, Exxon Mobil has become, if only slightly, a kinder and more gentle place. It has acknowledged global warming; it has advocated for a carbon tax. It is closely monitoring environmentally friendly alternative energies and, less popularly, has begun to get involved in risky drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

It's a company that's begun to care what we think of it. It seems to now want a good response to the following question, posed by a corporate-responsibility specialist to an Exxon Mobil executive, albeit in more graphic language than can be printed here:

What are you going to say to your grandkids when they say, Grandpa, why did you screw up the planet?

First Published May 13, 2012, 4:00 a.m.