An illustrated history of the petroleum industry in the state of California paired with the stories of companies that helped shape the industry.

The whole story of California1s oilfield and geothermal history is gathered into one volume. Begins in the 1860s, with pioneers mining and refining the asphaltum from tarry seeps. By 1876, the state had its first truly commercial oil well. Soon, many oil fields were being discovered and produced. Companies sought to capture as much oil as possible, as fast as they could. Events grew so chaotic that the petroleum industry itself sought regulation. Thus, on Aug. 9, 1915, the Calif. Dept. of Petroleum and Gas (now, the Div. of Oil and Gas) was formed. This book tells how the petroleum and geothermal industries and the Div. of Oil and Gas have developed together. Dozens of photos.

The petroleum industry is unique: it is an industry without which modern civilization would collapse. Despite the advances in alternative energy, petroleum’s role is still central. Petroleum still drives economics, geopolitics, and sometimes war. The history of petroleum is, to some measure, the history of the modern world. This book represents a concise but complete one-volume reference on the history of the petroleum industry from pre-modern times to the present day, covering all aspects of business, technology, and geopolitics. The book also presents an analysis of the future of petroleum, and a highly useful set of statistical graphs. Anyone interested in the history, status, and outlook for petroleum will find this book a uniquely valuable first place to look. This new second edition incorporates all the revolutionary changes in the petroleum landscape since the first edition was published, including the boom in extraction of oil and gas from shale formations using techniques such as fracking and horizontal drilling. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Petroleum Industry contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on companies, people, events, technologies, countries, provinces, cities, and regions related to the history of the world’s petroleum industry. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the petroleum industry.

Paul Sabin offers a study of the oil market in California before World War II, showing how the development of an economy & society very heavily dependent upon oil production & consumption was largely directed by policy decisions regarding property rights, regulatory law & public investment.

In light of the importance of oil and gas in California, perhaps the discovery of gold there should be viewed as just a flash in the pan. By 1938, the cumulative value of all the gold found in the state stood at something more than two billion dollars, while the cumulative value of the oil and gas produced was more than double that sum--well over five billion dollars. The story of California oil deserves to be told, and pictures tell it best. The more than three hundred photographs in this book vividly portray the development of California's rich and colorful petroleum industry from the early exploration of the mid-nineteenth century through the boom years of the first four decades of the twentieth. Although Indians and Spanish explorers had known of and used local oil seepages for centuries and the search for commercial production had begun on several fronts in the 1850s, the actual birth date of California's oil industry may be set as 1865, with the first commercial sale of oil refined in the state (by the Stanford brothers) from a well drilled in the state (on the Matthole River in Humboldt County). The fascinating text and the impressive array of photographs here assembled reveal the variety and vigor of the development that ensued: from the "world's smallest producing lease," on Signal Hill, to the derricks sharing Huntington Beach with the bathers, to the millions of mice infesting the Taft oil field in 1926-27; from the mounted patrols keeping livestock out of the Coalinga fields to the blinking light on a fence warning motorists of a well in the middle of a Los Angeles street. First among the states in oil production in eighteen of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, California experienced a boom of immense proportions and extraordinary diversity. These illustrations, along with contemporary descriptions by many of those who worked the fields and a wealth of detail provided by the authors, graphically portray the scenes and characters of California's second great mineral rush. An epilogue takes the boom up to the present, highlighting the shift in production to the offshore leases and the controversy surrounding them.

A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

This volume examines the social history of oil workers and investigates how labor relations have shaped the global oil industry during the twentieth century and today. It brings together the work of scholars from a range of disciplines, approaching the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of oil. The contributors analyze a number of key oil producing regions, including the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe and Africa.