“History repeats itself” goes the cliché, but so, ominously, does climate change. That’s the upshot of an ambitious new two-hour special about oil scheduled to air Sunday at 8 p.m. on the History Channel. “Crude” breathlessly charts the ubiquitous resource’s rise from humble plankton origins to staple of modern civilization, and predicts the boomerang fate of an era as Jurassically toasty as the ones that created black gold. Along the way, “Crude” delivers a mix of geological background, milestones of the drilling-industry timeline, and eager but not shrill notes on environmental impact. Doubling and tripling back, the jumpy presentation at times loses track of the material, aggravated by the narration’s unctuous hyperbole. But this attempt at jazzing up petrochemicals employs some fascinating facts and neat telescoped views of history (as well as my favorite television documentary standby, a spry oldster eyewitness with jug ears).

Molecules don’t make for great television, so “Crude” pitches the science of oil as the tale of a hardy carbon atom journeying through history — from carbon dioxide consumed by microscopic organisms to compressed ocean deposits of organic matter to the reserves of “sweet crude” discovered and prized by humans. The Jurassic Age, when the heavy lifting of oil formation occurred from the decay of animals and plants, also allows for the all-important computer-generated dinosaurs and winged squawkers. But “Crude” also trots out wise and weathered geologists who are happy to educate with the statistics behind the storytelling, and to hold up shards of flammable shale. The investigative journalist Sonia Shah, who wrote the equally sweeping 2004 book “Crude: The Story of Oil,” lends an ever-so-slight analytic edge with trenchant demonstrations of oil’s inescapability: Plastic-wrapped supermarket veggies from distant farms, for example, pack the double whammy of petroleum-based packaging and gas-guzzling truck transport.

The awed arc of “Crude” leads to the vast Ghawar Oil Field in Saudi Arabia and an entertaining, if incomplete, history of oil discovery. Pennsylvania, circa 1857, was America’s oil-rush ground zero, forested with derricks in archival photos, but the real highlight in this tar-to-cars sequence is a pair of eyewitness veterans from different trenches. A folksy engineer remembers his father testing a famous drilling process in the 1930s, while a besuited octogenarian recalls scouting out outrageously profitable sites for oil companies. (“I’m just a worker!” he says. “If I got a penny for every barrel since then, do you think I’d be here? In Modesto?”)

In any event, the party’s over now, or very soon, agree the geologists, who fling out frighteningly imminent dates for the peak of oil production. “Crude” also gives proper due to original prognosticator M. King Hubbert, the model of principled industry scientist sticking to his guns, who advanced the controversial theory that oil was a finite resource that could run out.

Depending on your tolerance for the filler noise endemic to much contemporary documentary, the attention-grabbing bits of “Crude,” such as the Jurassic animations and rampant sped-up footage, can feel vaguely embarrassing. And there’s certainly no excuse for the slightly loony paeans that tongue-tie the wearily ingratiating narrator: Oil, or “the oil genie,” arises from “the sludgy remains of tiny brainless plants waiting to hold dramatic sway on the future of the most intelligent life forms the planet has ever seen.”

“Crude” also manages to elide the demands of business and modern geopolitical reality from its sketch, and there’s an obliviousness to its genially monitory portrait of oil’s reach. (Whoopingly bizarre is the random use of a hypothetical skyscraper to illustrate spatially the amount of oil used in a year.) But, “love it or loathe it,” to quote from the narrator’s desperate bid to avoid a bummer ending, oil is key to life as we know it, and “Crude” at least hypes something worth mulling.