The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that old bird?

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

Oil men, like producers of other raw materials, could not continue to sell their products below cost...For prices to be raised, production had to be controlled, and to bring production under control, Ickes began with an all-out campaign against the "hot oiler,"...This bootleg oil was secretly siphoned off from pipelines, hidden in camouflaged tanks that were covered with weeds, moved about both in an intrcate network of secret pipelines and by trucks, and then smuggled across state borders at night.

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

The Western world, he believed, was afflicted by the curse of short-term thinking, the inevitable result of democracy.

We have got to find a a new plan of attacking it. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

It is certainly to be regretted that we have so many things to do and our business day is so fully occupied that somehow or other we seem to make mistakes which could have been avoided if we had really spent the time necessary to think the matter through to a logical conclusion.

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” Energetic

Getty’s 55-cent-a-barrel royalty to the Saudis loomed over Aminoil’s 35-cent royalty to Kuwait, the roughly 33-cent royalty that Aramco had just been compelled to pay the Saudis—and far overshadowed the 16½ cents that Anglo-Iranian and the Iraq Petroleum Company were paying in Iran and Iraq respectively, as well as the 15-cent royalty that the Kuwait Oil Company was paying.

the New World had become the oil granary for the Old; altogether, the United States was to satisfy 80 percent of the Allies’ wartime requirement for petroleum.

Simplicity rules everything worth while, and whenever I have been up against a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have realized that it was hopelessly wrong and I have let it alone.

objective, it said, was to push Gulf into transferring half of its U.S. oil and gas reserves into a royalty trust, which would be owned directly by the stockholders, giving them the cash flow and eliminating the double taxation on dividends.

As in the 1960s, oil and energy were now available in abundance and, thus, they were not a constraint on economic growth. Supplies were safe again. Excess oil capacity around the world exceeded demand by 10 million barrels per day, equivalent to 20 percent of the free world’s consumption.

January 1861, fell to 50 cents by June and, by the end of 1861, were down

There is no substitute for energy,” Schumacher said in 1964, echoing Jevons, the nineteenth-century economist and celebrator of coal. “The whole edifice of modern life is built upon it. Although energy can be bought and sold like any other commodity, it is not ‘just another commodity,’ but the precondition of all commodities, a basic factor equally with air, water and earth.” Schumacher argued vigorously for the use of coal to supply the world’s energy needs. Oil, he believed, was a finite resource

The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive.

A man is a business failure if he lets his family life interfere with his business record,

In the 1920s, he decided that it was cheaper to drill for oil than to buy the overvalued shares of other oil companies. After the 1929 stock market crash, he completely changed tack; he saw that oil shares were selling at a great discount to assets, and he turned to prospecting for oil on the floor of the stock exchange—in

Never give orders—give instructions. … Make a game out of your work. … The greatest dividend in human life is happiness.

It was very handy to have such a foreign scapegoat when so much was wrong at home.1