Sublime

Oil historian Daniel Yergin writes: “86% of oil reserves in the United States are the result not of what is estimated at time of discovery but of the revisions” that come when our technology improves.

In April 1972 the Texas Railroad Commission lifted its limits on the state’s output and hence surrendered its control of the price that it had held since the 1930s. In 1971, Algeria and Libya began to nationalize their oil production, and Iraq followed in 1972, the same year that Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia began their gradual takeover of their

On January 1 1974, the Gulf states raised their posted price to $11.65/barrel, completing a 4.5-fold rise in the cost of this essential energy source in a single year—and this ended the era of rapid economic expansion that had been energized by cheap oil. From 1950 to 1973 the Western European economic product had nearly tripled, and the US GDP had

During the late 1960s, the already high American demand for oil rose by nearly 25 percent, and global demand increased by nearly 50 percent. European demand had nearly doubled between 1965 and 1973, and Japanese imports became about 2.3 times higher.[45] As mentioned, new discoveries of oil covered this surge in demand and oil was selling at what w