On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 6:18 PM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On 15May2018 1454, Richard Aiken wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 8:09 PM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
wrote:

The naval treaties of the 20s and 30s were . . . terrible for UK's ship
builders, especially those specialising in large military vessels, as
demand dried up completely.

Maybe they should have gotten into bed with Standard Oil and started
building supertankers a few decades early?

Back then the middle oil fields were just about all under the UK's control, so it'd have been British Petroleum. It's a nice idea, but there wasn't the demand (or the facilities) for such big tankers back then.

According to ig.com, there was - thanks to the rise of the private automobile - a slowly rising global demand for gasoline in the years following WW1, with an actual "gas famine" occurring in the Western half of the United States beginning in 1920.

In our real history, new Texan oil wells more than cured this "famine" beginning in 1930, actually causing an oil glut during the Depression years.

However . . .

Had been a fleet of relatively large tankers available to move oil from the Venezuela fields (brought into production in 1922) to Californian ports (and thus fill demand relatively cheaply), would those Texans still have invested in such wildcat drilling?

Richard Aiken

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