Oil and the wealth it has brought has transformed this land bringing the twenty-first century to the desert. Wild Arabia III: Shifting Sands, BBC 2013
Today close to a third of the world’s oil is supplied by the countries of the Gulf. ibid.
The rigs are home to dozens of beautiful species. ibid.
The 2005 Energy Bill pushed through Congress by Dick Cheney exempts the oil and natural gas industries from the Safe Drinking Water Act. They were also exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund Law and about a dozen other environmental and democratic legislations. Josh Fox, Gasland 2010 *****
Gulf of Mexico, July 4 2010: 75th day of the BP oil spill: It was hard to believe my eyes: as far as I could see the surface of the Gulf was streaked with oil like ghosts along the surface. Josh Fox, Gasland II ***** 2013, Fox
BP was spraying chemical dispersants on the surface of the Gulf in huge volumes, a chemical that had been banned in Britain actually makes the oil more toxic and sinks it out of sight: they weren’t solving the crisis, just hiding it. ibid.
John D Rockefeller began as a humble oil business book-keeper in Cleveland, Ohio, and in just seven years rose to control a tenth of the entire US oil business.
In the late 19th century the oil industry was a free-for-all, the law of the jungle ruled. Rockefeller used this ‘individual freedom’ to pursue several extremely successful and deceitful tactics to accumulate capital.
He would secretly buy up or create new oil related companies such as engineering and pipeline firms. These seemed to be independent operators. Rockefeller and his close colleagues secretly controlled the firms and gave Standard Oil, Rockefeller’s main oil company, hidden rebates.
Another tactic was to buy up a competing oil company, again secretly. Officials from this company could then be used very effectively to spy on, and give advanced warning of, deals being hatched by his real competitors.
Almost certainly the most lucrative secret deals done by Rockefeller and his partners were with the railroads. These ‘in harmony’ deals meant those refineries and oil traders not ‘in harmony’ with standard would find that railroads would refuse point blank to move their oil, whatever the price.
Oil, of course, is free at source, so once the investment in refining and extraction plant has been made the only really important cost was transportation. Rockefeller’s secret railroad rebates on the transportation of his oil kept his competitors guessing for years. None of them could understand how he kept pump prices so low. They were all bemused that Standard Oil had being growing at such a rate. How he managed to persuade the railroads to give him rebates and keep the deals secret is still not clear. Tony Gosling, article ‘Greed Posing as Philanthropy’
1964 ... one hundred miles off the north-east coast of Scotland ... Britain struck oil. Iain Stewart, Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World I, BBC 2015
The strange alchemy of oil: from the first moment we drew the stuff from the ground we opened a Pandora’s box that changed the world for ever. ibid.
We live in an age of oil. It’s used in almost every part of our daily lives. ibid.
This marriage of pressure and temperature has created a material that’s absolutely jam-packed with energy. ibid.
It was the perfect scam: Rockefeller could reduce his own shipping costs to almost nothing. ibid.
He [Nobel] found a strange black landscape, a place where the very rocks were on fire. ibid.
1952 Smog: Over 4,000 people were dead, and hundreds of thousands more had been hospitalised. The cause of the catastrophe was this: coal. In the winter of 1952 for the first time in years we were burning astronomical amounts of the stuff. Iain Stewart, Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World II
Britain had run out of oil. Our society was addicted to the stuff but had none of its own. ibid.
A new superpower ... the undisputed King of Crude – Saudi Arabia. ibid.
Roosevelt knew just how important Saudi Arabia was going to be. ibid.
Britain’s refusal to share Iran’s oil equally with the country’s new political leader was a disaster misjudgment. ibid.
Mosaddegh: Operation Ajax was a new approach to energy security: one in which political treachery was an acceptable tactic in pursuit of oil. ibid.
Nasser demanded control of the canal ... The Suez crisis as it came to be known. ibid.
Whether the young geologists I’m training become Earth exploiters or Earth students. Iain Stewart, Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World III *****
If there’s loads of fossil fuel still in the ground, can we really afford to burn what’s left? ibid.
1971 The North Sea Oil industry was born ... Oil stimulated the economy. ibid.
For a short time the North Sea produced as much oil as Saudi Arabia. ibid.
The Russians were rich in oil ... Caspian oil was being opened up to the world. ibid.
By 2006 the world was demanding four times as much oil a day as it did in 2000 ... the demand shock. ibid.
Peak Oil: So have supplies peaked? ibid.
As one oilman said: If oil didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. ibid.
On the same day similar marches took place all over the world: more than half a million people took to the streets in over a dozen countries ... Paris 2015: the protesters are demanding that world leaders actually reach a deal this time – a global agreement to slash carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades. ibid.
What would that planet look like? ibid.
Can the oil companies silence one man who dares to speak the truth? His enemies began a campaign of dirty tricks. They even sent women to try to entrap him. Can one man stand up for what he believes? Chuck Hamel was about to find out. Crime Stories: The Whistleblower, 2004
The more Hamel dug the more he found: according to Alyeska insiders, the company was also secretly dumping toxic waste into the pristine Alaskan waters. ibid.
An industry riddled with dirty secrets ... Intentional air and water pollution; worker safety violations; severely corroded pipeline; and a faulty system for detecting leaks. ibid.
The oil companies have been lobbying Congress to drill in America’s largest wilderness – the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ibid.
Alyeska was about to take desperate measures to silence the oil man who had turned against them. ibid.
Congress was shocked. ibid.
In the past, when the United States was confronting the Soviet Union and competing for influence with Moscow in the Middle East, the stake in whose allies controlled what oil reserves had a military and strategic dimension. But today, with the Soviet Union cooperating in the crisis, that argument has lost much of its urgency. Thomas Friedman, The New York Times diplomatic correspondent
The huge reserves of oil and gas, about 50 per cent of Kazakhstan’s voluminous capacity, that sit 100 miles and more away at the bottom of the Caspian sea. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Other mobsters now make their living brokering major gas and oil deals between Russia, its neighbours and Western Europe, recording handsome profits for their clients and themselves. ibid.
The police went on to discover that Boros had been involved in the biggest single criminal scam to hit Europe during the 1990s – the Heating Oil Scandal. ibid.
In Odessa a battle over oil exports broke the city in two. Karabas’s death showed that not even the mafia can compete when the full weight of the state becomes involved in trans-national corruption and criminality. ibid.
It is a pariah state. Since then, Transnistria’s President, Igor Smirmov, a former ‘red dictator’ of a factory in the capital Tiraspol, has relied for support on a coterie of KGB officers, oligarchs and an uncharacteristically forgiving attitude of Gazprom to the huge debt that Transnistria has run up with the energy giant. ibid.
The al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi. The discovery of huge oil reserves on Abu Dhabi territory proved a godsend to Dubai and the other five emirates that formed the new state of United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1973 after the British decided to withdraw all its forces east of Suez. At present extraction, Abu Dhabi’s oil will last for another 200 years. The al-Nahyans’ cash ... is estimated to stand at $500 billion – half a trillion. ibid.
Nigeria’s passage into the global market, floating atop the world’s sixth largest oil reserves, has created one of history’s most divided societies in terms of income distribution. ibid.