"True sustainability" is the line of engineering research and practice that is giving rise to a series of Scrivener textbooks, such as Khan & Islam's best-selling The Greening of Petroleum Operations. Making explicit reference to his own recently-published book in this series, Sustainable Energy Pricing, as the companion volume of this book, the author applies the principles of true economic sustainability developed there to re-examine actual engineering practices in fossil fuel and as well as alternative-energy (such as wind and tidal power) exploration and development.

One of the book's original features is its analysis of what is deficient in the thinking and analytical frameworks that inform actual engineering work done out in the field. The author believes the failure of certain prominent  thinkers to address the real issues of true sustainability forms part of the core of the contemporary crisis in energy and other resource development. From this standpoint, and in painstaking and comprehensive detail, he challenges the reasoning and conclusions published by theorists of what is called "peak oil," and by scholars responsible for Nobel Prize-winning work in the field of information economics.

Explicitly linking an informed understanding of the actual role of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to any serious effort to renew the foundations of resource development engineering practices on a truly sustainable basis, this book also breaks sharply with the  generally negative opinion of OPEC widely expressed in North America. Its discussion of various aspects of OPEC's history and overall approach is right up to date, including a Postscript that frames the overthrow and death of the late Col. Ghaddafi of Libya on 20 October 2011 as the act that brought the curtain down on "the third war since 1991 to be led from the U.S. against an OPEC member-state."