Bottom of the barrel: why the Saudis wish they'd discovered water instead.
Washington Monthly › Vol. 41 Nbr. 11-12, November 2009
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Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil - Book review
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Bottom of the barrel: why the Saudis wish they'd discovered water instead.
Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
by Peter Maass Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pp. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The world's first oil well was drilled 150 years ago on a farm two miles outside the wooded hamlet of Titusville, Pennsylvania, by a man named Edwin L. Drake. Drake was forty years old, an erstwhile railroad conductor and a gifted huckster; he arrived in Pennsylvania's logging country with a bogus title--Colonel E. L. Drake--to better impress the locals. His financiers had mostly written him off by August 1859 when, more than a year after he started his work, Drake finally struck oil. The farmers who worked along Oil Creek came running to witness the future bubbling up greasily from the pasture. What happened next--recounted in detail in The Prize, Daniel Yergin's 1...See the full content of this document
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