Word: petroleum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...avarice. A king who pays his chief of staff $153 month and his soldiers $2 could scarcely ignore the new $4 to $6 million airfield at Dhahran in the rival neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the $6 million a year that blear-eyed Ibn Saud gets from U.S. petroleum concessions. Yahya's Yemen has no oil with which to bargain in the bazaars of international high finance, but it is strategically located near the foot of the Red Sea, across the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Gulf, toward which Russia reaches south and east...
...Petroleum deposits lying between the ocean's low-tide mark and the three-mile limit. For several years control of tidelands oil has been a hot federal-state controversy. A federal suit to obtain title is pending in the Supreme Court; a bill to give title to the states is pending in the Senate...
Actually, even with all the modern improvements and extensions of the pickaxe, oil drilling was a rather precarious venture until this discovery. Contour mapping and geological surveys of suspected petroleum areas have led to reasonably good results, but the tremendous investment required to drill an oil well made a miss really a mile. Leet predicted that his discovery would take a great deal of the gamble out of the oil business...
...Pinned Medals of Merit (Civilian equivalent of the D.S.M.) on ex-Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Deputy Petroleum Administrator Ralph K. Davies...
...ZoBell also found that certain bacteria etch little holes in limestone, allowing petroleum to percolate through. Others give off gases, forcing oil out of dead-end pores. Others pry oil films off mineral surfaces. All these quiet, persistent activities probably help the oil to collect in large underground pools...