Episode 1 Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World

In 1964, the year I was born, a discovery was made

that transformed not just my life, but Britain and the world.

I'm heading 100 miles off the north-east coast of Scotland

into the wilds of the North Sea

to see where that landmark moment happened.

Ahead of me is an oil platform,

one of many throughout these waters

that changed our country's energy fortunes almost overnight.

When Britain struck oil, she took her seat at the top

table of a very exclusive club of oil-producing nations.

But the North Sea story is just the latest in an epic tale that

tells of the strange alchemy of oil.

From the first moment we drew this stuff from the ground,

we opened a Pandora's box that changed the world forever.

It transformed the way we lived our lives.

Dictated the outcome of our worst global conflicts.

Became an obsession for some of our greatest leaders,

and turned a simple natural resource into the most powerful

political weapon the world has ever known.

Have you tried to get petrol anywhere else?

Oh, yes. Very, very difficult.

But when exactly did geology turn into such a high stakes game?

To find out, I'm going to immerse myself in the story of oil.

I'll visit the places that have given birth to the Earth's

oil riches.

Ah, that's the weirdest feeling.

Discover the people who fought over its control and supply.

Actually, it's a really big deal, the leaders of two Western countries

signing this decree that would essentially overthrow another one.

And explore how our insatiable thirst for oil is transforming

the very planet on which we depend.

We have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil.

It's a journey that I hope will help me answer a fundamental question.

How did we become so addicted to oil

in little more than one human lifetime?

At what point did Planet Earth become Planet Oil?

We live in an age of oil.

It's used in almost every part of our daily lives.

From the food we eat...

..to the very fabric of our homes.

By harnessing crude oil we've completely reshaped our lives.

It's made us mobile, it's allowed us

to heat and light our homes.

But also it keeps hospitals clean,

it keeps supermarkets stocked, it gives us most of our food and drink.

Like it or not, it's part and parcel of my daily routine.

Of your daily routine.

It all shows just what an incredibly versatile resource oil is.

But it also highlights the frightening speed with which

we as a species, have come to rely on it.

One of the big things is the basic over...

'As a professor of geo science at Plymouth University, I lecture

'on the geology of oil.'

Ripple effect through the rock. Importantly....

'But whilst my students learn about the makings of this stuff,

'I teach them very little about why their lives are so shaped by it.'

To understand that question, we need to first go back to the beginning

and explore the origins of where oil actually comes from.

Here at Kimmeridge on the Dorset coast,

I can begin to answer that question.

The marine fossils preserved in the rock layers

all around here are a clue to the unique quality of this landscape.

For this is the makings of an oil factory.

This entire cliff is essentially just a

vertical slice through an ancient seabed.

Or rather a successive series of seabeds,

because each of these layers are muds that formed on the ocean

floor and more were put on top and on top,

till the layers kind of pushed down and compressed one another.

But although these layers are all interesting,

there's one that's especially important, and it's this one here.

From about here to here, the locals calls this black stone,

but we know it as oil shale.

This dense layer of rock, is incredibly rich in hydrocarbons,

the building blocks of oil, and they're packed with energy.

But shale is young in geological terms.

What I'm interested in is what it turns into in a few million years.

And to see that, I need to speed up time.

By heating it with a simple blowtorch,

we can mimic the way in which the shale is heated

and compressed under the Earth's surface over many millennia.

It's a process that eventually turns into this.

This is the stuff, this brown smear on the side of the glass

that's transfixed humankind for over a century now.

It's oil.

And what makes it so mesmerising is that it's an incredible

feat of natural engineering.

This is energy from the sun that's been concentrated by creatures

over decades and centuries and then intensified in this

geological pressure cooker kilometres beneath my feet

where this marriage of pressure and temperature has created

a material that is absolutely jam-packed with energy.

Far more energy than almost anything else on the planet,

more than waves, more than wind, more than the tide.

And it's the exploitation of that energy,

and what it's allowed us to do, that is the essential story of oil.

It's a story that starts 150 years ago.

With our quest to use this concentrated energy of oil, to

push back the night, and illuminate the world like never before.

In 1853, an amateur geologist wandered across these

meadows in Pennsylvania, searching for oily puddles.

His name was George Bissell.

He had watched as locals soaked up the liquid with blankets,

then used it as an ointment to treat various ailments.

But Bissell wasn't interested in the medicinal properties of this oil.

He wanted to create this. Light.

Up until the mid-19th century the world had been

relying on whale oil to produce most of its artificial light.

So much so, the animal had almost been driven to

extinction as a result.

Something else was needed to light the world, and Bissell had a hunch

that the oily pools he was seeing might promise an ocean of new fuel.

But in an age when geology was little more than guesswork, he'd

no idea how much was there, or how far down he'd have to go to find it.

Bissell needed someone to dig for him.

Enter one Colonel Edwin Drake,

a former railway conductor from New York.

A man who was just as fascinated by oil,

but who also liked to get his hands dirty.

In the spring of 1859, bankrolled by

Bissell, Drake set up at a promising site near the town of Titusville.

His approach was straightforward enough.

Drill down, strike oil, pump it out of the ground.

What could be simpler?

Almost as soon as Drake started drilling, he encountered a problem.

Three feet down he hit the water table and there, soft,

saturated sands and muds just collapsed in on the hole.

It was like digging into quicksand.

It seemed like the end of the road, but while Bissell despaired,

Drake set about solving the problem.

And what he came up with

was as simple as it was genius.

Just a few miles from Drake's well, I've come to visit local oil man,

Billy Huber, whose family have been drawing oil from the ground

in this area for generations, in much the same way as Drake.

I'm hoping to learn about the art of drilling

and shed some light on exactly what Drake's clever idea was.

If we went back 100 years, how would this be different?

-This? It wouldn't be any different.

-Wouldn't be any different?

Is that quite a nice feeling? The idea you're doing it the same way?

Yeah. When my great-great-grandfather

-come over here, that's what he was, is a...

-When was that, then?

1859.

Oh, right, 1859, that's the year of Drake's well.

-He was in at the start.

-Yeah, he was in the start of it.

That's so cool.

So when you've cleared the ground and you're going to start drilling,

what's the kind of first stage that you do?

You drill the drive pipe in.

So the drive pipe. Tell us about the drive pipe.

The drive pipe's a piece of pipe 12 inches wide.

-Yeah, so it's about that size.

-Yeah, about like that.

-And how long?

-20 feet long.

And so, I mean, what would happen if you drilled without a drive pipe?

You'd take a chance of your well collapsing.

Yeah, so was that a kind of really crucial development in those

-early stages?

-Yeah, it was a big development in the 1800s

when they first started.

It seems to me quite a simple idea.

Yeah, it's a real simple idea.

The first drive pipe was wood and now it's steel.

But that simple idea which was, you know, 1859 or

something like that, you're still doing it today.

Yeah.

By running his drill through this drive pipe

instead of directly into the ground,

Drake overcame the problem of the drill hole collapsing.

It was a neat solution that allowed him

to drill deeper into the ground than anyone had done before.

And on the 27th of August, 1859,

he reached a depth of 69.5 feet...

..and struck oil.

Drake was completely taken by surprise,

he just didn't know what to do.

So he grabbed some old whisky barrels that happened to be lying

around and used them to gather up the oil, which is why we use barrels

today as the kind of currency, if you like, of oil production.

But even in that instant,

Drake knew he was going to need a lot of barrels.

What began as a geological shot in the dark was on course

to light up America.

Edwin Drake and George Bissell didn't know it,

but by extracting oil from the ground in large quantities

like this and refining it into a useful product

like kerosene, they had become the fathers of the modern industry.

But their oil bonanza didn't go unnoticed.

Within 12 months, Drake was joined by a forest of over

75 drilling rigs that popped up around his Titusville site.

By 1861

around one million barrels were being produced a year -

far more than anyone knew what to do with.

Oil Creek became a frenzied oil grab

and nowhere typified this chaos more than in the town of Pithole.

I've come to meet local historian Brian Black to find out

more about this apocryphal tale.

What you do to tell the story of a community is you go through

US census records and one of the things that sums up Pithole

is it never appears in the US census

because the decennial census happens every ten years and so 1860

it didn't exist, certainly, 1865 its oil begins

to come in, and then by 1870 no-one's here any more.

-So it's a flash in the plan.

-Exactly.

And so over a six-month period you had a town,

a very prosperous town, develop just out of nowhere, literally.

You'd have ten hotels.

You'd have enough saloons to support them,

and essentially you were bringing buildings up from the ground

as quickly as you could and opening them immediately.

But for all that initial kind of planning,

it sounds like once it started to take off it was pretty chaotic.

Absolutely chaotic and there was very little law, there was

very little control over anything and no-one really cared

about controlling it because really what mattered was the oil.

So that's what leads to the boom, that's what leads people to rush.

So was Pithole a victim of its own success?

I think it was.

It's crazy to think of today that we were sloppy with oil

but they had a bunch of it and it was the only place it was

coming from and they simply didn't have the technology

to control it well and so, yeah, it was slopping all over the place.

They may have found oil here, but the pioneering fathers

of the industry didn't have a clue what to do with it,

apart from get it out of the ground as frantically as possible.

As a result, America's first oil boom descended into chaos

almost as soon as it had started.

But as Oil Creek drowned in an ocean of crude,

one man had been watching it all -

an angel of light who was going to bring order

to the brave new world of oil.

This is the New York stately home of one of the most powerful men

the world has ever known.

I'd like to welcome you to the home of the richest man in America,

welcome to Kykuit.

An enigmatic Baptist who hated money, yet who made so much of it

you'd need to multiply Bill Gates' fortune by ten to match it.

This, I believe, was one of the most important rooms of this house.

This was really the centre for philanthropy -

a scientific approach, a whole new way of giving away money.

John D Rockefeller.

A name known to many, but a man known by few.

So you can see by these photos, family is very important

-and they were a family just like your family at home.

-Mmm.

Rockefeller would famously give a dollar to every adult

and a dime to every child he met, such was his generosity.

But there's more to this man than the quiet,

upstanding gentleman of American folklore.

Rockefeller was a towering figure of the oil industry,

a man who taught the world how to use oil and made us realise

how much we needed it and on the back of it made an absolute fortune.

But for all this notion of Rockefeller as

the well-meaning benefactor, the way that he achieved that dominance

was through a calculated ruthlessness.

One that earned him a nickname -

The Anaconda.

Rockefeller had, just like George Bissell and Edwin Drake,

been struck by oil fever in the 1860s, but he was no geologist.

Rockefeller was a numbers man.

As a greengrocer, he had made a good living by carefully counting

every dollar and cent to build his business up,

so when Oil Creek came about,

Rockefeller was just as fascinated by lighting up America as Bissell.

But he had done his sums.

He knew the price of whale oil had quadrupled in a year

and was now unaffordable.

He knew that for every dollar spent drilling an oil well,

thousands were returned.

He knew that the world was turning to kerosene to light their homes

and that the numbers looked good.

Rockefeller invested all his fruit

and veg money in an oil refinery in 1865

and quickly used the profits to build a second one.

But, crucially,

he also did something else that others in Pennsylvania had not.

While everyone else was fixated with quantity,

for Rockefeller it was quality that was key.

I mean, oil was only valuable if it could be refined into something

that people actually wanted to light their homes with and to ensure

that that happened, he had to make his kerosene the best around.

Standardising the quality of his product was the key

to success for Rockefeller.

And what better way to guarantee that quality

than to name your company after it?

Standard.

An oil you could always trust.

As far as Rockefeller was concerned, this was going to be

the only name that lit up America.

And to be absolutely sure that happened,

the Anaconda was about to earn his reputation as a ruthless oil baron.

For Rockefeller, getting his oil to market

was just as important as ensuring its quality,

and that part of the jigsaw depended on the rail network.

But in order to influence the transportation of oil, he would

have to conspire with the railroad companies that controlled it.

I've come to meet Rockefeller historian

Barbara Shubinski to find out more.

The deals that Standard Oil cut with the railroads involved two aspects.

The most straightforward one is a rebate.

So a railroad has a set price for shipping freight

and a large shipper like Standard Oil might get a discount.

You can think of it as a bulk discount, so he's shipping

more cheaply than his competitors, especially the smaller competitors.

But the second aspect of the deal with the railroads is what

really drives it home, which is called the drawback.

What a drawback is is the penalty you pay as a small producer -

unbeknownst to you - to the big producer who is already getting

his own discount or rebate and that's Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

-Wow.

-So if you figure shipping is two dollars,

Standard Oil pays one dollar per gallon, per bushel,

per barrel, you know, what have you. A smaller competitor is paying two,

but 50 cents out of their two is also going to Standard Oil

so in the end, they're paying two and Standard Oil's paying 50 cents.

-So it's price fixing right across that sector.

-Right.

It's kind of genius. I mean...

-It is kind of genius.

-That's incredible.

It was the perfect scam.

Rockefeller could reduce his own shipping costs to almost nothing

while those of his competitors became unaffordable.

And as he was their biggest customer,

the railroads were more than happy to play along with his game.

By today's standards it's a highly illegal practice,

but in 1870 it was a power that allowed Rockefeller

to kill the competition and take total control of the industry.

Within a decade, he monopolised America's kerosene supply

owning over 80% of it.

Rockefeller was the undisputed king of light.

Never before had one man become so rich and powerful so quickly

on the back of a single natural resource.

The only problem he did have was a geological one.

While the world was falling in love with this new fuel, nobody knew

how much of it there was or where exactly you could find some more.

Rockefeller may have brought light to America

and in the process taken control of the oil industry, but to be honest,

was it worth controlling if there was no oil to sell?

He thought that he'd cracked that problem of supply

when geologists drilling through the limestone rocks of Ohio uncovered

what was, at the time, the world's biggest reserves of crude oil.

In typically aggressive style,

Standard moved in and bought the lot.

Eventually Rockefeller had amassed something like ten million barrels

of Lima oil, an act that almost bankrupted the company.

Mind you, he had secured the world's oil future.

Or had he?

It turns out there was a problem with Rockefeller's new oil.

From BBC Television, we're doing a series about oil.

And this stuff, 100 years ago, they used to light their homes with.

Never took on. I'm just wondering, what do you think? What do you...?

Woow! Smells like a stink bomb!

Eww!

Oh!

-What's wrong?

-Stinks.

Nice? Not nice? You like?

No!

Ooow!

Damn! Smells like shit, dude!

-Have a smell.

-Eurgh!

That's disgusting! Get away from me!

No. What's wrong with my oil?

The Lima wells produced something that was called skunk oil

because it absolutely stank.

I mean, this stuff...

smells like something's crawled in there and died.

That rich aroma is a noxious cocktail of crude oil and sulphur.

The thing is, see when you burn this stuff, it smells even worse.

That's the point, no-one wanted to light their homes

with something that smelled of skunk,

and yet Rockefeller had just bought an ocean of the stuff.

His solution? Throw money at the problem.

Rockefeller paid some of the world's finest chemists to work out

a way of removing the oil's sulphurous odour.

It was a close call, but it worked

and Rockefeller managed to maintain his stranglehold on the industry.

But smelly oil was an omen of things to come.

For 6,000 miles away,

a new chapter in Planet Oil was about to begin...

..one that was going to turn Rockefeller's world upside down.

Eurgh!

That's disgusting.

Eurgh! It's hot as well.

HE LAUGHS

HE EXHALES DEEPLY

Oh, that's the weirdest feeling.

I guess, to appreciate oil, you have to do this -

you have to immerse yourself completely in it.

That's the way to...

to understand it.

This Baku oil, let me introduce you.

It's got low viscosity, which means it's runny, basically.

It's really high quality, which means it refines easily

and it burns for a long time, so it's fantastic stuff.

Round here, they talk mainly about its health qualities.

It's really good for arthritis and for skin diseases like psoriasis.

That's what it was used for up until the 1870s, when one man

could see a very different future for it.

Robert Nobel,

a military industrialist, had arrived in this remote land

by the shores of the Caspian Sea in search of wood to make rifles.

But instead of green forests, he found a strange black landscape.

A place where the very rocks were on fire.

For Nobel, this was not like being on Earth,

but somewhere deep inside it.

He witnessed rivers of oil and flaming gas vents everywhere...

..all signs of a landscape that was alive with nature's energy.

And as these mud volcanoes show, that geological power

is as evident today as it was for Nobel in the 1870s.

This is just a baby one, some of them around here can be

700 metres high and 10km across.

What's actually driving it is hundreds of metres

down beneath me - soft mud that's under lots of pressure and has got

pockets of natural gas that rise up and spew out at the surface.

What that means is that, although this landscape sounds

like a kind of gurgling toilet, actually what it's telling you

is that there's this vast pool of hydrocarbons deep beneath our feet.

And it was that hydrocarbon energy that sparked Nobel's interest.

For in them, he saw his opportunity to join the age of light.

He and his brother formed The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company,

and set about establishing what was going to become

the single biggest oil producer in the world.

But a glut of new kerosene was not much use to them

without a market to sell it to.

Whilst demand was high in neighbouring countries like Russia,

the Nobels knew that if they wanted to be

a serious player in the industry,

they had to find new territory of their own...

..and that meant looking east.

Asia was a massive market for any new supplier,

but it was a long way from the oil fields.

A torturously slow and expensive land route

from Baku across the Middle East was the only way

of getting the Nobels' kerosene to their new customers.

And if that wasn't bad enough, they had another problem -

the Anaconda was watching.

Rockefeller also had his eye on lighting up Asia...

and getting his oil there by sea from America was in fact

easier than it was for the Nobels to transport theirs by land.

If the new pretenders were going to compete with the king of kerosene

and crack Asia, they needed to solve their transportation problem fast.

The answer came in the unlikely form of this.

The son of an English shell merchant,

and a man who would solve the Nobels' Baku oil problem

and, in turn, create one of the great brands of the modern world.

He was called Marcus Samuel.

Samuel was a frugal merchant, famed for his cost-cutting prowess

and well connected to the Asian market that the Nobels

so desperately wanted to reach.

Oil was not his business, but seeing off the competition was.

Samuel figured that to shut Rockefeller

and Standard Oil out of Europe and Asia,

what he needed to do was to ship Robert Nobel's oil quicker

and in greater bulk,

basically selling it cheap and fast to the new market.

But to do that he had to piece together

one last crucial part of the jigsaw -

the Suez Canal.

Opened in 1869, the Suez was a new man-made waterway

that connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

It allowed merchant ships to carve over 2,000 miles

off their journey from Europe into Asia.

If the Nobels' Baku oil was going to get to market faster,

they needed to use this new canal.

The problem was that the old clipper ships used to carry oil

in the 19th century were deemed unsafe by the canal's owners.

For them, thousands of barrels of oil rolling around

a huge wooden hold was simply too dangerous.

If Samuel could alter the basic shape of the vessel,

from the kind of traditional bathtub design

with a large single or double hold

to something that was longer and slender

and had multiple sealed chambers,

then not only could he carry more oil, but he could do it safer.

The result was something that would transform the way that crude oil

gets transported and on the way create one of the great icons

of the modern oil industry.

The super tanker - the solution to the company's problem.

Samuel could now transport twice as much oil

and because it was safely stored in lots of sealed containers,

the Suez Canal deemed it safe enough to use the waterway.

It was a game changer.

Samuel's new oil tankers beat Rockefeller to Asia,

and by 1892, it allowed them

to totally dominate the oil market there.

Baku became THE worldwide hub for oil production,

making the Nobel brothers very rich men and, thanks to Marcus Samuel,

creating one of the most iconic names the industry has ever known.

The Anaconda's monopoly was over.

This industry was just too big for one man to control.

And it wasn't long before others joined in this global oil race.

In the last years of the 19th century,

a new oil giant emerged with every new oil find,

and it seemed that there was oil to be found everywhere in the world,

from the jungles of Sumatra, to South America,

and to the plains of Texas.

This was a glut of new crude to feed this new age of light.

But as the new kings of oil fought over whose kerosene

was going to burn the brightest,

they failed to notice a new spark on the horizon

that would eclipse them all

and threaten the very existence of the oil industry.

Electricity.

On 4th September 1882,

the inventor Thomas Edison flicked a switch on a steam-powered motor

here at Holborn Viaduct

and sent a surge of electric current through some wires that immediately

illuminated dozens of street lamps and homes in this patch of London.

In that moment, Edison brought electric illumination

to the masses - the clean, safe, easy-to-use form of light.

Within two years, most of the western world would be using it

to light their homes,

which is great news for the inventor, but catastrophic for oil.

With the advent of the electric light,

oil was rendered almost completely redundant overnight

and it highlighted a huge problem for the industry.

It only really had one use and without it,

it had no purpose at all.

As far as the new giants of the industry were concerned,

they simply had to find another reason for the world to need oil.

Lucky for them, they were about to find one.

ENGINE STARTS

Last year, a new watermark was reached

when the number of cars in the world surpassed one billion -

that's one for every six people on the planet.

It's a statistic that tells of probably the single greatest

technological revolution the world has known.

We're obsessed with cars the world over.

Their invention allowed us to move around like never before.

And for the oil industry,

this new age of mobility was an absolute godsend.

The invention of a machine that actually needed oil to work

was like manna from heaven, but perhaps more remarkable

was the type of oil it needed.

In the age of light, kerosene was the only thing

that the oil industry wanted out of the refining process.

But with the advent of the car, all that was about to change.

I've come to a petrochemical lab in London to take a closer look

at what that transformation was.

So this is the laboratory equivalent of a refinery.

Our crude oil is actually in the flask here at the bottom.

Ah, look at that, boiling away.

-As you can see, it's boiling away.

-Fantastic.

So the temperature of this flask at the moment

is probably around about 100 degrees C, and the oil is boiling,

the lighter boiling material is going up the column as a vapour.

-Yep.

-It hits our condenser at the top, the vapour liquefies,

drops back down the column,

so the lighter material comes off first

and it gradually gets heavier and heavier

as you go through the distillation process.

As the crude oil is heated,

the useful products we all know and love begin to emerge.

Gases like propane come first, followed by kerosene

and the other liquid hydrocarbons.

And so is this the order they come off?

Yes, so the first product - many years ago -

was basically a waste product that was discarded.

The second product is the kerosene.

So kerosene, this is the, kind of... The gold dust of the time?

This gave us all that fantastic light.

Yes, very much so, and nowadays it's used as aviation fuel.

Of course, yeah.

So, basically, each of these have their uses, have their own value.

Very much so, yes.

It's like a little alcoholic still you've got going on here.

THEY LAUGH

-Yes.

-You're not tempted sometimes... a little whisky...

a little whisky set-up you could have here?

Unfortunately not, no.

I think the government tax might have something to say about that.

Today, oil refinement creates many useful products,

but as the automobile emerged in the early 20th century,

ironically, it was the least valued part of the distillation process

that was going to become the industry's most prized asset.

This clear liquid that came from that refinement

was once considered one of those useless by-products,

it was just chucked away.

But as the age of light began to be overtaken by the age of speed,

all that was about to change, because it was this,

not the car, that was the saviour of the oil industry.

This...is gasoline.

Gasoline's by-product status was, perversely, the very thing

that made it useful in the first place.

When Karl Benz was experimenting

with the world's first internal combustion engine,

it was the only fuel he could afford,

and he designed his engine accordingly.

It was a happy accident that would transform gasoline

from waste product to automotive gold dust.

For the first time in human history we had an energy source

so potent that a thimbleful could do the work of 20 horses.

That concentrated power was oil's new future, and it wasn't long

before the entire world realised how much we'd need it.

In 1911, as Winston Churchill took up his role

as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1,000 miles away

off the coast of Morocco, something ominous appeared on the horizon.

A German gunboat had arrived

in response to the French colonisation of Morocco.

But it wasn't so much the military threat that troubled Churchill,

it was the gunboat's speed.

A speed driven by oil.

Britain's naval fleet, indeed its entire military might,

relied on coal, something Britain had plenty of.

But it was dirty, slow

and, as far as Churchill was concerned, completely out of date.

What he needed was a new type of energy that packed a punch.

He needed oil.

As Churchill himself said in 1911,

there's only one defence and that's speed.

The fact is that oil generated twice as much heat as coal when it burns,

and that means that warships could go further, they could go faster,

something like 25 knots for oil versus only ten for coal.

That's a hell of a difference.

In military terms it gave Germany a critical advantage.

Churchill's warships needed oil.

The dilemma was that whilst crude oil was emerging at the heart

of the modern military, Britain had absolutely none of its own.

But thankfully, Churchill knew exactly where to get some.

MIDDLE EASTERN MUSIC

Since the turn of the century,

British companies had been scouring the Middle East for the black stuff.

And it was in these barren desert lands

that Churchill saw his opportunity.

In June 1914,

legislation was passed that secured him the biggest oil deal in history.

A little-known company called Anglo-Persian Oil

was granted an exclusive contract to supply oil to the British military,

but with one crucial caveat.

The government owned 51%.

The controlling share.

It was a landmark moment.

For the first time in history...a government was in the oil business.

The future energy needs of nations was going to depend on this resource

to keep them moving, and much more besides.

Churchill knew it and in that moment showed

that he wasn't just a clever politician,

but a true oil visionary.

And with the greatest conflict

the world had ever seen about to take hold,

it would prove more important than even Churchill could imagine.

By the outbreak of the Great War,

Churchill's overhaul of his military fleet was well underway,

and he had secured a river of Middle Eastern oil to feed it.

But none of it could stop the Great War

being the tragedy that it was.

People power, not oil, was still at the heart of frontline conflict.

When I think of the Great War, I think of trench warfare

and that colossal human carnage

that places like this just bring home to you,

but one of the most defining moments of the conflict

wasn't dictated by the gun, but by gasoline.

Outside of France the incident is hardly known,

but here it's referred to as the Taxi Armada,

and the key to it was the speed of oil.

It's an event that took place within a month of the outbreak

of the Great War in 1914.

Paris was already on the verge of being taken by the Kaiser,

as German forces amassed just a few miles from the city limits.

The fall was imminent.

While most people, including the entire French government,

had already fled Paris, the city's military general,

the rather eccentric Joseph Gallieni,

was less keen to see it abandoned.

For him, if Paris fell, the war was lost.

The Germans had to be stopped.

The French made a desperate attempt to save the city,

but found themselves heavily outnumbered on the front line.

Gallieni needed reinforcements,

but all his backup troops were 30 miles away in Paris.

The story goes that General Gallieni was standing on the street

near Les Invalides when he saw a taxi go by...

..then he saw another one,

and another and it suddenly dawned on him -

what if he took these new gasoline-powered cars

and used them to take his troops to the front?

And so the call went out to all Parisian cabs to abandon

their passengers and assemble at the Boulevard des Invalides.

I'm catching a cab ride with historian Laurent Henninger

to find out what happened next.

So tell me, how did the Taxi Armada unfold?

Well, the 600 taxis were gathered here

on that very Esplanade des Invalides where we are at the moment.

They gather the troops... and with five troopers per taxi.

So, was it a turning point, if not in the war,

but in the way that motor vehicles were used in war?

Yes, because it was probably one of the first examples,

historical examples, of the extensive use of cars

in transporting troops in a war.

It was the beginning of a big historical trend

that was the motorization of warfare.

Right, so it wasn't just symbolic,

it was actually a game changer, in the sense of the way it was done.

Of course, it was a huge game changer,

and there's a funny little anecdote that while the taxis were carrying,

were ferrying the troops, their meters were running.

So they were still charging?!

-Yes.

-That's brilliant.

Gallieni's Taxi Armada supplied over 6,000 troops to the front

within 24 hours.

With the French line strengthened, the Germans fell back.

Never before had so many been moved so quickly.

But the story of the Parisian Taxi Armada

was not just about quick military thinking,

it was a sign of how oil was going to shape our future.

From armies to everyday life,

mankind was falling in love with the black stuff

and as the ink finally dried on the Versailles Treaty in 1919,

both the winners and the losers were in no doubt

about just how significant that was.

And there was one place on the planet that was going to be

crucial to oil's future,

a region that had been completely torn apart by the Great War.

The Middle East had been ruled over by the Turks for hundreds of years.

But the price of allying with German in World War I

was the collapse of their empire in 1918.

Most of the Allies were scratching their head over what to do

with this vast region.

All of them except one.

Britain's oil guru, Winston Churchill,

knew exactly what to do.

For him, this kingdom represented oil security

and the key to keeping Britain great.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire wasn't so much a problem...

more an oil opportunity.

The Allies agreed to partition large parts of the region

into a new league of nations,

a redrawing of the map that would be the template

for much of the Arab world today.

Up until now, Churchill's interest had mainly been on Iran,

thanks to the government's stake in Anglo-Persian Oil.

But with this new mandate his attention turned

to neighbouring Mesopotamia, better known today as Iraq.

This would be his next big oil steal.

But Churchill wasn't the only oil baron on the scene.

He had competition.

Calouste Gulbenkian,

a British-born Armenian businessman

who was as passionate about oil as the British were.

Gulbenkian was a rising star in the oil industry

and had made a fortune from the oil fields of Baku.

But the Middle East had always been the real prize,

and in 1925, he began the search for oil in Iraq.

His instincts proved correct when, in 1927,

he struck the world's biggest oil well

at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk in Northern Iraq.

The massive oil find would provide Gulbenkian with untold wealth.

But like Churchill, he wasn't so much interested

in the money oil brought, as the power it could wield.

On July 31st, 1928,

in the Belgian city of Ostend,

Gulbenkian gathered together around the same table the heads

of the world's top oil companies - Anglo-Persian, Standard, Shell.

His plan was to invite them

to tender for his newly acquired oil fields.

But with one crucial caveat.

Gulbenkian pulled out a map, laid it on the table

and drew a thick red line around all the Middle Eastern territories

that were owned by the companies in the room.

"These are our oil fields," he said.

"But what if we make them one single oil field?"

Gulbenkian's plan was to create a single oil cartel

out of the area marked in red,

under which all the companies would operate under shared terms

and equal ownership.

That meant full cooperation on everything

from production to pricing.

What Gulbenkian proposed was an end to competition between oil producers

and the creation of a new monopoly.

The Iraq Petroleum Company, a new oil superpower.

The Middle East now joined the rest of the world

in the rise of Planet Oil, ensuring that we would all,

quite literally, be in the black for generations to come.

Or would we?

CROWDS CHEER

For before the world even had a chance to recover from the tragedy

of the Great War, another global conflict was on the horizon.

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

CROWD ROARS

Hitler's vision was of a thousand-year Reich.

But as his armies advanced across Europe in the autumn of 1939,

he knew that oil was going to be the key to make that happen.

World War II was a conflict consumed by crude.

In the air...

at sea....

and on the ground, every battle was fed by oil.

Hitler's war machine needed some four million barrels every month,

yet within a year of the conflict starting,

his monthly supplies were less than half that.

He needed oil fast,

and the massive reserves of Baku was where he would get it.

The race was on.

For the Germany Army, that quest became a brutal 2,000 mile push

across some of the most inhospitable terrain in Europe,

and through the Red Army lines that stood in their way.

It was a catastrophic failure.

Blinded by the prize, Hitler's oil-thirsty armies

ran out of the very fuel they were chasing

long before they ever reached Baku.

It was a problem that dogged the German military campaign

at every turn. I mean, Messerschmitt jets,

state of the art fighters, twice as fast as anything the Allies had got,

were grounded, hauled off runways by farm animals,

whilst the oil reserves that Germany did control - mainly in Romania -

were bombarded relentlessly by Churchill and the Allies.

Churchill knew that by destroying what little oil Hitler did have,

whilst at the same time protecting his own supplies,

the war would be won.

Britain's oil guru was right yet again.

By 1944, Germany was almost all out of fuel.

Hitler's war was over.

The thousand-year Reich ultimately stuttering through a lack of oil.

It was a remarkable fact that showed just how much

20th century conflict was controlled not by the will of man,

but by the power of petroleum.

CROWD CHEERS

As the war ended,

it was clear just how much oil was going to reshape our entire future.

Returning soldiers wanted to drive gasoline-powered cars

more than ever before.

Their wives now wanted new clothes made from the latest fashion craze,

nylon produced from oil derivative Benzene.

And their children, the baby boomer generation,

began to play with hula hoops and a whole host of modern toys,

made from another new oil-based invention - plastic.

The very fabric of family life was now woven from oil

and we were going to use it like never before.

It's when you're in a place like this that it really hits you.

This...this is oil.

I don't mean the energy just to create this stuff,

I mean the material that clothes us,

that feeds us, that gives us this kind of paraphernalia of daily life.

By the end of World War II, we had entered the age of Hydrocarbon Man

and with that was essentially the makings of who we are today.

But the world was going to need a lot of oil

to feed our new addiction.

And as far as the post-war leaders of the Western world were concerned,

the Middle East was going to be our key supplier.

Britain's oil visionary, Churchill, had already foreseen

just how important this region was going to be,

and it wasn't long before others saw it, too.

US President Roosevelt had spent much of the war

eyeing the Middle East's growing oil reserves,

and there was one part of it that interested him more than any other.

One August evening in 1944,

before the final bell had even been tolled on World War II,

Britain's ambassador to the US, Lord Halifax,

was invited to the White House for dinner with the President.

Roosevelt had a little sketch he wanted to show him.

The President produced a map of the Middle East under which

various lines were drawn.

"Persian Oil, that's yours," he said.

"Iraq and Kuwait we share.

"And as for Saudi Arabian oil, that's ours."

That blunt statement defined America's entire vision

of the future. This was going to be an age where politics shaped oil,

and where Saudi Arabia fuelled Hydrocarbon Man.

But in their haste, Roosevelt, Churchill,

and the other self-appointed kings of crude

had overlooked one important thing...

..the people whose oil they were taking.

Planet Oil was about to get political,

as Saudi Arabia and much of the Middle East flexed their muscles

and took control of their own oil destiny.

Next time, we look at how the most powerful oil superpower

the world has ever known came to dominate...

The era of a very cheap source of energy is gone.

And this is a new era.

..and how its rise would bring the rest of the world to its knees.

'The sudden cut off of oil from the Middle East

'has turned the serious energy shortages we expected this winter

'into a major energy crisis.'