Royal Navy switches to oil
In 1913, under First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the British Royal Navy committed to converting its battleships from coal to oil. The decision was technical (oil ships could refuel at sea, accelerated faster, and required smaller crews) but it was strategic disaster: Britain had infinite coal at home and no oil at all. Churchill solved the problem by buying a 51 percent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company — the predecessor of BP — securing British government control over Iranian oil for the next half-century. It was the first time a Western power tied a strategic-military commitment directly to a foreign hydrocarbon supply, and the first explicit oil-for-security deal in modern history.
Anglo-Persian Oil discovered commercial oil at Masjed Soleyman in Iran in 1908, after a final desperation drilling campaign funded almost entirely by William Knox D'Arcy. Without that 1908 strike, the Royal Navy's 1913 oil pivot would have been unworkable, and 20th-century British policy in the Middle East would have looked completely different.
03 · Black Gold
Oil arrived as a curiosity — a medicine, a lamp fuel, a substitute for whale oil — and within fifty years had become the most strategic commodity on Earth. The first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. By 1911 a single American family controlled most of the world's refined oil. By 1914 the British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil at Churchill's insistence, and the country with the best oil reserves was no longer Britain. The 20th century is, in plain economic terms, the century the energy capital moved from Tyneside to Texas — and from Texas, eventually, to Riyadh.
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