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Professor Iain Stewart visits the places that gave birth to the earth's oil riches, discovers the people who fought over its control and supply and explores how our insatiable thirst for oil is changing the very planet on which we depend.
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00:06In 1964, the year I was born, a discovery was made that transformed not just my life,
00:13but Britain and the world.
00:16I'm heading 100 miles off the north east coast of Scotland, into the wilds of the North Sea,
00:23to see where that landmark moon happens.
00:33Ahead of me is an oil platform, one of many throughout these waters that changed our country's energy fortunes almost
00:41overnight.
00:44When Britain struck oil, she took a seat at the top table of a very exclusive club of oil-producing
00:51nations.
00:56But the North Sea story is just the latest in an epic tale that tells of the strange alchemy of
01:02oil.
01:05From the first moment we drew this stuff from the ground, we opened a Pandora's box that changed the world
01:12forever.
01:14It transformed the way we lived our lives, dictated the outcome of our worst global conflicts,
01:22became an obsession for some of our greatest leaders, and turned a simple natural resource into the most powerful political
01:31weapon the world has ever known.
01:39But when exactly did geology turn into such a high-stakes game?
01:46To find out, I'm going to immerse myself in the story of oil.
01:53I'll visit the places that have given birth to the Earth's oil riches.
01:57Oh, that's a weird feeling.
02:00Discover the people who fought over its control and supply.
02:05I mean, that seems to be a really big deal.
02:06The leaders of two Western countries sign in this decree that would essentially overthrow another one.
02:12And explore how our insatiable thirst for oil is transforming the very planet on which we depend.
02:20We have a serious problem.
02:22America is addicted to oil.
02:26It's a journey that I hope will help me answer a fundamental question.
02:29How did we become so addicted to oil in little more than one human lifetime?
02:35At what point did planet Earth become planet oil?
02:59We live in an age of oil.
03:06It's used in almost every part of our daily lives.
03:14From the food we eat,
03:17to the very fabric of our homes.
03:24At Harness and Crude Oil, we've completely reshaped our lives.
03:29It's made us mobile.
03:30It's allowed us to heat and light our homes.
03:33But also, it keeps hospitals clean.
03:35It keeps supermarkets stocked.
03:37It gives us most of our food and drink.
03:39Like it or not,
03:40it's part and parcel of my daily routine.
03:43Of your daily routine.
03:47It all shows just what an incredibly versatile resource oil is.
03:53But it also highlights the frightening speed with which we,
03:56as a species,
03:57have come to rely on it.
03:59One of the big things is the basic overpower.
04:02As a professor of geoscience at Plymouth University,
04:04I lecture on the geology of oil.
04:07A little ripple effect into the rock.
04:10Importantly...
04:10And whilst my students learn a lot about the makings of their stuff,
04:13I teach them very little about why their lives are so shaped by it.
04:19To understand that question,
04:21we need to first go back to the beginning
04:23and explore the origins of where oil actually comes from.
04:39Here at Kimmeridge on the Dorset coast,
04:41I can begin to answer that question.
04:47The marine fossils preserved in the rock layers all around here
04:51are a clue to the unique quality of this landscape.
04:56For this is the makings of an oil factory.
05:04This entire cliff is essentially just a vertical slice through an ancient seabed.
05:10Or rather, a successive series of seabeds.
05:14Because each of these layers are muds that formed on the ocean floor
05:18and more were put on top and on top
05:20until the layers kind of pushed down and compressed one another.
05:24But although these layers are all interesting,
05:26there's one that's especially important.
05:28And it's this one here.
05:30From about here to here.
05:32The locals call this Blackstone.
05:34But we know it as oil shale.
05:40This dense layer of rock is incredibly rich in hydrocarbons,
05:44the building blocks of oil.
05:47And they're packed with energy.
05:50But shale is young in geological terms.
05:53What I'm interested in is what it turns into in a few million years.
06:00And to see that, I need to speed up time.
06:05By heating it with a simple blowtorch,
06:07we can mimic the way in which the shale is heated
06:09and compressed under the Earth's surface over many millennia.
06:15It's a process that eventually turns into this.
06:20This is the stuff.
06:21This brownies smear on the side of the glass
06:24that's transfixed humankind for over a century now.
06:29It's oil.
06:30And what makes it so mesmerising
06:32is that it's an incredible feat of natural engineering.
06:36This is energy from the sun that's been concentrated by creatures
06:41over decades and centuries.
06:42And then intensified in this geological pressure cooker
06:46kilometres beneath my feet
06:47where this marriage of pressure and temperature
06:50has created a material that's absolutely jam-packed with energy.
06:54Far more energy than almost anything else on the planet.
06:57More than waves, more than wind, more than the tides.
07:01And it's the exploitation of that energy.
07:03And what it's allowed us to do
07:05that is the essential story of oil.
07:11It's a story that starts 150 years ago
07:15with our quest to use this concentrated energy of oil
07:18to push back the night
07:20and illuminate the world like never before.
07:33In 1853, an amateur geologist wandered across these meadows in Pennsylvania
07:39searching for oily puddles.
07:44His name was George Bissell.
07:48He watched as locals soaked up the liquid with blankets
07:52and then used it as an ointment to treat various ailments.
07:55But Bissell wasn't interested in the medicinal properties of this oil.
07:59He wanted to create this.
08:01Light.
08:07Up until the mid-19th century,
08:09the world had been relying on whale oil
08:11to produce most of its artificial light.
08:15So much so,
08:16the animal had almost been driven to extinction as a result.
08:23Something else was needed to light the world.
08:25And Bissell had a hunch that the oily pools he was seeing
08:28might promise an ocean of new fuel.
08:34But in an age when geology was little more than guesswork,
08:38he had no idea how much was there
08:39or how far down he'd have to go to find it.
08:45Bissell needed someone to dig for him.
08:55Enter one Colonel Edwin Drake,
08:57a former railway conductor from New York.
09:02A man who was just as fascinated by oil
09:05but who also liked to get his hands dirty.
09:11In the spring of 1859,
09:13bank rolled by Bissell,
09:15Drake set up at a promising site near the town of Titusville.
09:21His approach was straightforward enough.
09:24Drill down, strike oil, pump it out of the ground.
09:30What could be simpler?
09:33Always as soon as Drake started drilling he encountered a problem.
09:37Three feet down he hit the water table and there,
09:40soft saturated sands and mud just collapsed in on the hole.
09:44It was like digging into quicksand.
09:46It seemed like the end of the road but while Bissell despaired,
09:50Drake set about solving the problem.
09:53And what he came up with was as simple as it was genius.
10:04Just a few miles from Drake's well,
10:06I've come to visit local oil man, Billy Huber.
10:10His family have been drawing oil from the ground in this area for generations,
10:14in much the same way as Drake.
10:19I'm hoping to learn about the art of drilling and shed some light on exactly what Drake's clever idea was.
10:28If we went back a hundred years, how would this be different?
10:31This? Yeah.
10:32It wouldn't be any different than this.
10:33It wouldn't be any different.
10:34Is that quite a nice feeling, the idea you did it the same way?
10:37Yeah. When my great-great-grandfather started to come over here,
10:40that's what he was.
10:41When was that then?
10:441859.
10:461859, that's the year of Drake's well.
10:48He was in at the start.
10:50Yeah, he was in the start of it.
10:51That's so cool.
10:56So when you've cleared the ground and you've got to start drilling,
10:59what's the kind of first stage that you do?
11:01You drill the drive pipe in.
11:04To the drive pipe.
11:06Tell us about the drive pipe.
11:07The drive pipe's a piece of pipe twelve inches wide.
11:11Yeah.
11:12So it's about that size.
11:13Yeah.
11:14About like that.
11:15And how long?
11:1620 feet long.
11:17Alright.
11:19So what would happen if you drilled a drive pipe?
11:22It would take a chance of your well collapsing.
11:26Yeah.
11:27So was that a really crucial development in those early stages?
11:30It was a big development in the 1800s when they first started.
11:35Seems to me quite a simple idea.
11:37Yeah.
11:37It's a real simple idea.
11:39The first drive pipe was wood.
11:41Right.
11:41And now it's steel.
11:43But that simple idea, which is, you know, 1859 or something like that.
11:48Yeah.
11:48Are you still doing it today?
11:50Yeah.
11:54By running his drill through this drive pipe, instead of directly into the ground, Drake
11:59overcame the problem of the drill hole collapsing.
12:04It was a neat solution that allowed him to drill deeper into the ground than anyone had done before.
12:13And on the 27th of August, 1859, he reached a depth of 69.5 feet and struck oil.
12:30Drake was completely taken by surprise, just didn't know what to do.
12:33So he grabbed some old whiskey barrels that happened to be lying around and used them to gather up the
12:39oil.
12:40Which is why we use barrels today as a kind of currency, if you like, of oil production.
12:45But even in that instant, Drake knew he was going to need a lot of barrels.
12:48What began as a geological shot in the dark was on course to light up America.
12:57Edwin Drake and George Bissell didn't know it.
13:00But by extracting oil from the ground in large quantities like this,
13:04and refining it into a useful product like kerosene,
13:07they'd become the fathers of the modern industry.
13:12But their oil bonanza didn't go unnoticed.
13:18Within 12 months, Drake was joined by a forest of over 75 drilling rigs that popped up around his Titusville
13:24site.
13:29By 1861, around 1 million barrels were being produced a year.
13:34Far more than anyone knew what to do with.
13:37Oil Creek became a frenzied oil grab.
13:41And nowhere typified this chaos more than in the town of Pithole.
13:52I've come to meet local historian Brian Black to find out more about this apocryphal tale.
14:03What you do to tell the story of a community is you go through U.S. census records.
14:08And one of the things that sums up Pithole is it never appears in the U.S. census.
14:12Because the decennial census happens every 10 years.
14:16And so 1860, it didn't exist, certainly.
14:191865, its oil begins to come in.
14:22And then by 1870, no one's here anymore.
14:24So it's a flash in the fire.
14:25Exactly.
14:26And so over a six-month period, you had a town, a very prosperous town, develop just out of nowhere,
14:35literally.
14:42You'd have 10 hotels.
14:44You'd have enough saloons to support them.
14:47And essentially, you were bringing buildings up from the ground as quickly as you could and opening them immediately.
14:58But for all that initial kind of planning, it sounds like once it started to take off, it was pretty
15:04chaotic.
15:05Absolutely chaotic.
15:06And there was very little law.
15:08There was very little control over anything.
15:11And no one really cared about controlling it because really what mattered was the oil.
15:16So that's what leads to the boom.
15:17That's what leads people to rush.
15:24So was Pithole a victim of its own success?
15:26I think it was.
15:27It's crazy to think of today that we were sloppy with oil.
15:31But they had a bunch of it.
15:34And it was the only place it was coming from.
15:36And they simply didn't have the technology to control it well.
15:39And so, yeah, it was slopping all over the place.
15:48They may have found oil here.
15:50But the pioneers and fathers of the industry didn't have a clue what to do with it.
15:54Apart from getting it out of the ground as frantically as possible.
15:57As a result, America's first oil boom descended into chaos almost as soon as it started.
16:06But as Oil Creek drowned in an ocean of crude, one man had been watching it all.
16:11An angel of light who was going to bring order to the brave new world of oil.
16:24This is a New York stately home of one of the most powerful men the world has ever known.
16:31I'd like to welcome you to the home of the richest man in America.
16:34Welcome to Kaiken.
16:37An enigmatic Baptist who hated money, yet who made so much of it.
16:42You'd need to multiply Bill Gates' fortune by ten to match it.
16:48This, I believe, is one of the most important rooms of this house.
16:52This was really the centre for philanthropy.
16:54A scientific approach, a whole new way of giving away money.
17:02John D. Rockefeller.
17:05A name known to many, but a man known by few.
17:08So you can see by these photos, family is very important.
17:11And they were a family just like your family at home.
17:14Mmm.
17:17Rockefeller would famously give a dollar to every adult and a dime to every child he met.
17:21Such was his generosity.
17:25But there's more to this man than the quiet, upstanding gentleman of American folklore.
17:34Rockefeller was a towering figure in the oil industry.
17:37A man who taught the world how to use oil.
17:40Made us realise how much we needed it.
17:42And on the back of it, made an absolute fortune.
17:46But for all this notion of Rockefeller as the well-meaning benefactor,
17:51the way that he achieved that dominance was through a calculated ruthlessness.
17:56One that earned him a nickname.
17:58The Anaconda.
18:04Rockefeller had, just like George Bissell and Edwin Drake,
18:07been struck by oil fever in the 1860s.
18:10But he was no geologist.
18:13Rockefeller was a numbers man.
18:17As a greengrocer, he had made a good living by carefully counting every dollar and cent
18:22to build his business up.
18:24So when Oil Creek came about, Rockefeller was just as fascinated by lighting up America's Bissell.
18:30But he had done the sums.
18:32He knew the price of whale oil had quadrupled in a year and was now unaffordable.
18:37He knew that for every dollar spent drilling an oil well, thousands were returned.
18:43He knew that the world was turning to kerosene to light their homes and that the numbers looked good.
18:52Rockefeller had invested all his fruit and veg money in an oil refinery in 1865
18:56and quickly used the profits to build a second one.
19:00But crucially, he also did something else that others in Pennsylvania had not.
19:08While everyone else was fixated with quantity, for Rockefeller it was quality that was the key.
19:15I mean, oil was only valuable if it could be refined into something that people actually wanted to light their
19:20homes with.
19:21And to ensure that that happened, he had to make his kerosene the best around.
19:30Standardising the quality of his product was the key to success for Rockefeller.
19:35And what better way to guarantee that quality than to name your company after it?
19:42Standard. An oil you could always trust.
19:48As far as Rockefeller was concerned, this was going to be the only name that lit up America.
19:57And to be absolutely sure that happened, the Anaconda was about to earn his reputation as a ruthless oil baron.
20:09For Rockefeller, getting his oil to market was just as important as ensuring its quality.
20:15And that part of the jigsaw depended on the rail network.
20:21But in order to influence the transportation of oil, he would have to conspire with the railroad companies that controlled
20:28it.
20:31I've come to meet Rockefeller historian Barbara Shabinski to find out more.
20:39The deals that Standard Oil cut with the railroads involve two aspects. The most straightforward one is a rebate.
20:45So a railroad has a set price for shipping freight and a large shipper like Standard Oil might get a
20:51discount.
20:52You can think of it as a bulk discount.
20:54So he's shipping more cheaply than his competitors, especially the small competitors.
20:58But the second aspect of the deal with the railroads is what really drives it home, which is called a
21:04drawback.
21:05What a drawback is, is the penalty you pay as a small producer, unbeknownst to you, to the big producer
21:13who's already getting his own discount or rebate.
21:16And that's Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
21:18So if you figure shipping is $2, Standard Oil pays $1 per gallon, per bushel, per barrel, you know, what
21:27have you.
21:27A smaller competitor is paying $2, but $0.50 out of their two is also going to Standard Oil.
21:35So in the end, they're paying $2 and Standard Oil is paying $0.50.
21:38So it's price fixing right across that kind of sector.
21:42Right. It's kind of genius.
21:43It is kind of genius.
21:45I mean, that's incredible.
21:48It was the perfect scam.
21:50Rockefeller could reduce his own shipping cost to almost nothing, while those of his competitors became unaffordable.
21:58And as he was their biggest customer, the railroads were more than happy to play along with his game.
22:05By today's standards, it's a highly illegal practice.
22:08But in 1870, it was a power that allowed Rockefeller to kill the competition and take total control of the
22:15industry.
22:17Within a decade, he monopolized America's kerosene supply, owning over 80% of it.
22:26Rockefeller was the undisputed king of light.
22:31Never before had one man become so rich and powerful so quickly on the back of a single natural resource.
22:42The only problem he did have was a geological one.
22:46While the world was falling in love with this new fuel, nobody knew how much of it there was or
22:52where exactly you could find some more.
22:58Rockefeller may have brought light to America and in the process taking control of the oil industry, but to be
23:03honest, was it worth controlling if there was no oil to sell?
23:11He thought that he'd cracked that problem with supply when geologists drilling through the limestone rocks of Ohio uncovered what
23:18was at the time the world's biggest reserves of crude oil.
23:23In typically aggressive style, the standard moved in and bought the Lord.
23:31Eventually, Rockefeller had amassed something like 10 million barrels of limo oil.
23:35An act that almost bankrupted the company.
23:38Mind you, he had secured the world's oil future.
23:42Or had he.
23:44It turns out, there was a problem with Rockefeller's new oil.
23:51From BBC Television, we're doing a series about oil.
23:54Okay.
23:54And this stuff, a hundred years ago, they used to light their homes by.
23:58Never took on, I'm just wondering, what do you think, what are you...
24:02Whoo!
24:03Smells like a stink bomb.
24:09What's wrong?
24:10Stiff.
24:15Nice? Not nice?
24:16You like?
24:17No!
24:23Damn, smelly shit.
24:26Have a smell.
24:28Have a smell.
24:30No, what's wrong with my oil?
24:34The Lima Wells produced something that was called skunk oil because it absolutely stank.
24:39I mean, this stuff smells like something's crawled in there and died.
24:43And that rich aroma is a noxious cocktail of crude oil and sulphur.
24:49And the thing I see when you burn this stuff, it smells even worse.
24:53And that's the point.
24:53No one wanted to light their homes with something that smelled of skunk.
24:58And yet Rockefeller had just bought an ocean of the stuff.
25:01What's wrong with it?
25:02What's wrong with it?
25:03What's wrong with it?
25:05His solution?
25:06Throw money at the problem.
25:08Rockefeller paid some of the world's finest chemists to work out a way of removing the oil's sulphurous odour.
25:16It was a close call, but it worked.
25:19And Rockefeller managed to maintain his stranglehold on the industry.
25:30But smelly oil was an omen of things to come.
25:34For 6,000 miles away, a new chapter in planet oil was about to begin.
25:45One that was going to turn Rockefeller's world upside down.
25:52Oh, that's disgusting.
25:55It's hot as well.
26:01Oh, that's a weird feeling.
26:08I guess to appreciate oil, then you have to do that.
26:11You have to immerse yourself completely in it.
26:14That's the way to understand it.
26:17And this Baku oil, let me introduce you.
26:19It's got low viscosity, which means it's runny, basically.
26:22It's really high quality, which means it refines easily and it burns for a long time.
26:28So it's fantastic stuff.
26:30Around here they talk mainly about its health qualities.
26:33It's really good for arthritis and for skin diseases like psoriasis.
26:37And that's what it was used for up until 1870s,
26:40when one man could see a very different future for it.
26:49Robert Nobel, a military industrialist, had arrived in this remote land by the shores of the Caspian Sea in search
26:56of wood to make rifles.
27:00But instead of green forests, he found a strange black landscape.
27:08A place where the very rocks were on fire.
27:13For Nobel, this was not like being on Earth, but somewhere deep inside it.
27:20He witnessed rivers of oil and flaming gas vents everywhere.
27:25All signs of a landscape that was alive with nature's energy.
27:34And as these mud volcanoes show, that geological power is as evident today as it was for Nobel in the
27:411870s.
27:45This is just a baby one.
27:47Some of them around here could be 700 metres high and 10 kilometres across.
27:52What's actually driving it is hundreds of metres down beneath me.
27:55Soft mud that's under lots of pressure and has got pockets of natural gas in it which rise up and
28:01spew out at the surface.
28:03And what that means is that although this landscape sounds like a kind of gurgling toilet,
28:07actually what it's telling you is that there's this vast pool of hydrocarbons deep beneath our feet.
28:15And it was that hydrocarbon energy that sparked Nobel's interest.
28:22For in them, he saw his opportunity to join the age of light.
28:35He and his brother formed the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company.
28:39And set about establishing what was going to become the single biggest oil producer in the world.
28:47But a glut of new kerosene was not much use to them without a market to sell it to.
28:56Whilst demand was high in neighbouring countries like Russia,
28:59the Nobels knew that if they wanted to be a serious player in the industry,
29:04they had to find new territory of their own.
29:07And that meant looking east.
29:16Asia was a massive market for any new supplier.
29:19And it was a long way from the oil fields.
29:24A tortuously slow and expensive land route from Baku across the Middle East
29:29was the only way of getting the Nobels' kerosene to their new customers.
29:39And if that wasn't bad enough, they had another problem.
29:43The Anaconda was watching.
29:48Rockefeller also had his eye on lighting up Asia.
29:52And getting his oil there by sea from America was in fact easier than it was for the Nobels to
29:57transport theirs by land.
30:00If the new pretenders were going to compete with the king of kerosene in crack Asia,
30:05they needed to solve their transportation problem fast.
30:10The answer came in the unlikely form of this.
30:15The son of an English shell merchant and a man who would solve Nobel's Baku oil problem
30:20and in turn create one of the great brands of the modern world.
30:25He was called Marcus Samuel.
30:31Samuel was a frugal merchant, famed for his cost-cutting prowess
30:36and well connected to the Asian market that the Nobels so desperately wanted to reach.
30:43Oil was not his business, but seeing off the competition was.
30:52Samuel figured that to shut Rockefeller and Standard Oil out of Europe and Asia,
30:56what he needed to do was to shift Robert Noble's oil quicker and in greater bulk.
31:01Basically selling it cheap and fast to the new market.
31:04But to do that he had to piece together one last crucial part of the jigsaw.
31:10The Suez Canal.
31:16Opened in 1869, the Suez was a new man-made waterway that connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
31:23It allowed merchant ships to carve over 2,000 miles off their journey from Europe into Asia.
31:30If the Nobel's Baku oil was going to get to market faster, they needed to use this new canal.
31:39The problem was that the old clipper ships used to carry oil in the late 19th century were deemed unsafe
31:45by the canal's owners.
31:47For them, thousands of barrels of oil rolling around a huge wooden hold was simply too dangerous.
31:57If Samuel could alter the basic shape of the vessel from the traditional bathtub design with a large single or
32:04double hold to it,
32:05something that was longer and slender and had multiple sealed chambers, then not only could he carry more oil,
32:10but he could do it safer.
32:12The result was something that would transform the way that crude oil gets transported,
32:16and on the way create one of the great icons of the modern oil industry.
32:26The supertanker. The solution to the company's problem.
32:34Samuel could now transport twice as much oil, and because it was safely stored in lots of sealed containers,
32:40the Suez Canal deemed it safe enough to use the waterway.
32:50It was a game-changer.
32:56Samuel's new oil tankers beat Rockefeller to Asia,
32:59and by 1892 it allowed them to totally dominate the oil market there.
33:08Baku became the worldwide hub for oil production, making the Nobel brothers very rich men.
33:15And thanks to Marcus Samuel, creating one of the most iconic names the industry has ever known.
33:24The Anaconda's monopoly was over.
33:27This industry was just too big for one man to control.
33:33And it wasn't long before others joined in this global oil race.
33:38In the last years of the 19th century, a new oil giant emerged with every new oil plant.
33:44And it seemed that there was oil to be found everywhere in the world.
33:47From the jungles of Sumatra, to South America, and to the plains of Texas.
33:53This was a glut of new crude to feed this new age of light.
33:57But as the new kings of oil fought over whose kerosene was going to burn the brightest,
34:02they failed to notice a new spark on the horizon that would eclipse them all,
34:07and threaten the very existence of the oil industry.
34:13Electricity.
34:14On the 4th of September 1882, the inventor Thomas Edison flicked a switch on a steam-powered motor here at
34:22Holborn Viaduct,
34:23and sent a surge of electric current through some wires that immediately illuminated dozens of street lamps and homes in
34:30this patch of London.
34:32In that moment, Edison brought electric illumination to the masses.
34:37It's a clean, safe, easy to use form of light.
34:41Within two years, most of the Western world would be using it to light their homes.
34:45Which is great news for the inventor, but catastrophic for oil.
34:52With the advent of the electric light, oil was rendered almost completely redundant overnight,
34:58and it highlighted a huge problem for the industry.
35:03It only really had one use, and without it, it had no purpose at all.
35:10As far as the new giants of the industry were concerned,
35:14they simply had to find another reason for the world to need oil.
35:22Lucky for them, they were about to find one.
35:36Last year, a new watermark was reached, when the number of cars in the world surpassed one billion.
35:42It's one for every six people on the planet.
35:46It's a statistic that tells of probably the single greatest technological revolution the world has known.
35:56We're obsessed with cars the world over.
35:59Their invention allowed us to move around like never before.
36:03And for the oil industry, this new age of mobility was an absolute godsend.
36:12The invention of a machine that actually needed oil to work was like manna from heaven.
36:17But perhaps more remarkable was the type of oil it needed.
36:25In the age of light, kerosene was the only thing that the oil industry wanted out of the refining process.
36:32But with the advent of the car, all that was about to change.
36:38I've come to a petrochemical lab in London to take a closer look at what that transformation was.
36:46So this is the laboratory equivalent of a refinery.
36:49Our crude oil is actually in the flask here at the bottom.
36:52Oh, look at that. Boiling away.
36:53Yeah, it's boiling away.
36:54Fantastic.
36:55So the temperature of this flask at the moment is probably around about 100 degrees C.
36:59And the oil is boiling. The lighter boiling material is going up the column as a vapour.
37:04Yeah.
37:05It hits our condenser at the top.
37:07The vapour liquefies drops back down the column.
37:10So the lighter material comes off first.
37:12OK.
37:12And it gradually gets heavier and heavier as you go through the distillation process.
37:18As the crude oil is heated, the useful products we all know and love begin to emerge.
37:24Gases like propane come first, followed by kerosene and the other liquid hydrocarbures.
37:30And so is this the order they come off?
37:33Yes.
37:34So the first product many years ago was basically a waste product and discarded.
37:39Yeah.
37:39And the second product is the kerosene.
37:41The kerosene, this is kind of the gold dust of the time.
37:44This gave us all that fantastic light.
37:46Yes, very much so.
37:47And nowadays it's used as aviation fuel.
37:50Of course, yeah.
37:50So basically each of these have their uses, have their own value.
37:54Very much so, yes.
37:56It's like a little alcoholic still that you've got going on here.
38:00Yes.
38:00You're not tempted sometimes?
38:02A little whisky?
38:02No.
38:03A little whisky set up you could have here?
38:04Unfortunately not.
38:05No.
38:06I think the government tax might have something to say about that.
38:12Today, oil refinement creates many useful products.
38:15But as the automobile emerged in the early 20th century, ironically, it was the least valued
38:21part of the distillation process that was going to become the industry's most prized asset.
38:30This clear liquid that came from that refinement was once considered one of those useless by-products.
38:36It was just chucked away.
38:38But as the age of light began to be overtaken by the age of speed, all that was about to
38:43change.
38:44Because it was this, not the car, that was the saviour of the oil industry.
38:48This is gasoline.
38:54Gasoline's by-product status was, perversely, the very thing that made it useful in the first place.
39:02But when Carl Benz was experimenting with the world's first internal combustion engine,
39:07it was the only fuel he could afford, and he designed his engine accordingly.
39:12It was a happy accident that would transform gasoline from waste product to automotive gold dust.
39:19For the first time in human history, we had an energy source so potent that a thimble full could do
39:26the work of twenty horses.
39:28That concentrated power was oil's new future.
39:31And it wasn't long before the entire world realised how much we'd need it.
39:43In 1911, as Winston Churchill took up his role as First Lord of the Admiralty,
39:49a thousand miles away, off the coast of Morocco, something ominous appeared on the horizon.
39:59A German gunboat had arrived in response to the French colonisation of Morocco.
40:04But it wasn't so much the military threat that troubled Churchill.
40:08It was the gunboat's speed.
40:10A speed driven by oil.
40:16Britain's naval fleet, indeed its entire military might, relied on coal.
40:22Something Britain had plenty of.
40:24But it was dirty, slow, and as far as Churchill was concerned, completely out of date.
40:32What he needed was a new type of energy that packed a punch.
40:37He needed oil.
40:42As Churchill himself said in 1911, there's only one defence, and that's speed.
40:47The fact is that oil generated twice as much heat as coal when it burns.
40:51And that means that warships could go further, they could go faster.
40:55Something like 25 knots for oil versus only 10 for coal.
40:59That's a hell of a difference.
41:01And in military terms, it gave Germany a critical advantage.
41:05Churchill's warships needed oil.
41:10The dilemma was that whilst crude oil was emerging at the heart of the modern military,
41:15Britain had absolutely none of its own.
41:19But thankfully, Churchill knew exactly where to get some.
41:34Since the turn of the century, British companies had been scouring the Middle East for the black stuff.
41:42And it was in these barren desert lands that Churchill saw his opportunity.
41:53In June 1914, legislation was passed that secured him the biggest oil deal in history.
42:02A little known company called Anglo-Persian Oil was granted an exclusive contract to supply oil to the British military.
42:10But with one crucial caveat.
42:14The government owned 51%.
42:17The controlling share.
42:22It was a landmark moment.
42:25For the first time in history, a government was in the oil business.
42:31The future energy needs of nations was going to depend on this resource to keep them moving and much more
42:37besides.
42:39Churchill knew it.
42:40And in that moment, showed that he wasn't just a clever politician, but a true oil visionary.
42:49And with the greatest conflict the world had ever seen about to take hold,
42:53it would prove more important than even Churchill could imagine.
43:05By the outbreak of the Great War, Churchill's overhaul of his military fleet was well underway.
43:12And he had secured a river of Middle Eastern oil to feed it.
43:17But none of it could stop the Great War being a tragedy that it was.
43:25People power, not oil, was still at the heart of frontline conflict.
43:33When I think of the Great War, I think of trench warfare and that colossal human carnage that places like
43:39this just bring home to you.
43:40But one of the most defining moments of the conflict wasn't dictated by the gun, but by gasoline.
43:46Outside of France, the incident is hardly known, but here it's referred to as the Taxi Armada.
43:52And the key to it was the speed of oil.
43:59It's an event that took place within a month of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.
44:05Paris was already on the verge of being taken by the Kaiser, as German forces amassed just a few miles
44:11from the city limits.
44:15The fall was imminent.
44:18While most people, including the entire French government, had already fled Paris, the city's military general, the rather eccentric Joseph
44:26Guillenny, was less keen to see it abandoned.
44:29For him, if Paris fell, the war was lost. The Germans had to be stopped.
44:36The French made a desperate attempt to save the city, but found themselves heavily outnumbered on the front line.
44:42Gallienny needed reinforcements, but all his back-up troops were 30 miles away in Paris.
44:49The story goes that General Gallienny was standing on the street near Les Envalides when he saw a taxi go
44:55by.
44:56And then he saw another one, and another.
44:59And it suddenly dawned at him.
45:01What if he took these new gasoline-powered cars and used them to take his troops to the front?
45:08And so the call went out to all Parisian cabs to abandon their passengers and assemble at the Boulevard des
45:15Invalides.
45:18I'm catching a cab ride with historian Laurent Henninger to find out what happened next.
45:25So tell me, how did the taxi armada unfold?
45:28Well, the 600 taxis were gathered here on that very Esplanade des Invalides where we are at the moment.
45:38And they gathered the troops.
45:40And with five troopers per taxi.
45:46So it was at an atomic point, if not in the war, but in the way that motor vehicles were
45:49used in war.
45:50Yes, because it was probably one of the first examples, historical examples, of the extensive use of cars in transporting
45:59troops in a war.
46:02And it was the beginning of a big historical trend that was the motorization of warfare.
46:08Right. So it wasn't just symbolic. It was actually a game changer in the sense of the way it was
46:13done.
46:13Of course, it was a huge game changer. And there's a funny little anecdote that while the taxis were carrying,
46:21were ferrying the troops, their meters were running.
46:27So they were still charging?
46:28Yes.
46:28That's brilliant.
46:32Galliani's taxi armada supplied over 6,000 troops to the front within 24 hours.
46:37With the French line strengthened, the Germans fell back.
46:41Never before had so many been moved so quickly.
46:49But the story of the Parisian taxi armada was not just about quick military thinking.
46:54It was a sign of how oil was going to shape our future.
47:00From armies to everyday life, mankind was falling in love with the black stuff.
47:05And as the ink finally dried on the Versailles Treaty in 1919, both the winners and the losers were in
47:12no doubt about just how significant that was.
47:17And there was one place on the planet that was going to be crucial to oil's future.
47:21A region that had been completely torn apart by the Great War.
47:44The Middle East had been ruled over by the Turks for hundreds of years, but the price of allying with
47:50Germany in World War One was the collapse of their empire in 1918.
48:00Most of the Allies were scratching their head about what to do with this vast region.
48:05All of them except one.
48:07Britain's oil guru, Winston Churchill, knew exactly what to do.
48:11For him, this kingdom represented oil security and the key to keeping Britain great.
48:19The collapse of the Ottoman Empire wasn't so much a problem, more an oil opportunity.
48:27The Allies agreed to partition large parts of the region into a new League of Nations.
48:33A redrawing of the map that would be the template for much of the Arab world today.
48:40Up until now, Churchill's interest had mainly been on Iran, thanks to the government stake in Anglo-Persian oil.
48:48But with this new mandate, his attention turned to neighbouring Mesopotamia, better known today as Iraq.
48:56This would be his next big oil steal.
49:01But Churchill wasn't the only oil baron on the scene. He had competition.
49:11Kalyust Gulbenkian, a British-born Armenian businessman, who was as passionate about oil as the British were.
49:21Gulbenkian was a rising star in the oil industry and had made a fortune from the oil fields of Baku.
49:28But the Middle East had always been the real prize. And in 1925, he began the search for oil in
49:34Iraq.
49:42His instincts proved correct when, in 1927, he struck the world's biggest oil well at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk in
49:50northern Iraq.
49:52The massive oil fine would provide Gulbenkian with untold wealth.
50:01But like Churchill, he wasn't as much interested in the money oil brought as the power it could wield.
50:10In July 31st, 1928, in the Belgian city of Ostend, Gulbenkian gathered together around the same table the heads of
50:20the world's top oil companies, Anglo-Persian Standard Shell.
50:25His plan was to invite him to tender for his newly acquired oil fields, but with one crucial caveat.
50:34Gulbenkian pulled out a map, laid it on a table, and drew a thick red line around all the Middle
50:39Eastern territories that were owned by the companies in the room.
50:41These are our oil fields, he said. But what if we make them one single oil field?
50:54Gulbenkian's plan was to create a single oil cartel out of the area marked in red, under which all the
51:00companies would operate under shared terms in equal ownership.
51:05That meant full cooperation on everything from production to pricing.
51:16What Gulbenkian proposed was an end to competition between oil producers and the creation of a new monopoly.
51:25The Iraq Petroleum Company, a new oil superpower.
51:31The Middle East now joined the rest of the world and the rise of planet oil.
51:36Ensuring that we would all, quite literally, be in the black for generations to come.
51:44Or would we?
51:52For before the world even had a chance to recover from the tragedy of the Great War, another global conflict
51:58was on the horizon.
52:03Hitler's vision was of a thousand-year Reich.
52:06Hitler's vision 앞에.
52:07Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
52:09But as his armies advanced across Europe in the autumn of 1939, he knew that oil was going to be
52:16the key to make that happen.
52:23World War II was a conflict consumed by crude.
52:30In the air
52:32At sea
52:33And on the ground
52:35Every battle was fed by oil
52:41Hitler's war machine needed some 4 million barrels every month
52:45Yet within a year of the conflict starting
52:48His monthly supplies were less than half that
52:53He needed oil fast
52:54And the massive reserves of Baku was where he would get it
53:00The race was on
53:06For the German army
53:08That quest became a brutal 2,000 mile push
53:11Across some of the most inhospitable terrain in Europe
53:16And through the Red Army lines that stood in their way
53:23It was a catastrophic failure
53:27Blinded by the prize
53:28Hitler's oil-thirsty armies ran out of the very fuel they were chasing
53:33Long before they ever reached Baku
53:40It was a problem that dogged the German military campaign at every turn
53:44I mean, measuresmith jets
53:46State-of-the-art fighters
53:48Twice as fast as anything the Allies had got
53:50Were grounded
53:51Hauled off runways by farm animals
53:53Whilst the oil reserves that Germany did control
53:57And mainly in Romania
53:58Were bombarded relentlessly by Churchill and the Allies
54:06Churchill knew that by destroying what little oil Hitler did have
54:10Whilst at the same time protecting his own supplies
54:12The war would be won
54:17Britain's oil guru was right yet again
54:23By 1944
54:25Germany was almost all out of fuel
54:29Hitler's war was over
54:35The thousand-year Reich ultimately stuttering through a lack of oil
54:39It's a remarkable fact to show just how much 20th century conflict was controlled
54:44Not by the will of man
54:45But by the power of petroleum
54:51As the war ended
54:52It was clear just how much oil was going to reshape our entire future
55:03Returning soldiers wanted to drive gasoline-powered cars more than ever before
55:09Their wives now wanted new clothes made from the latest fashion craze
55:14Nylon produced from oil-derivative benzene
55:18And the children, the baby boomer generation, began to play with hula hoops and a whole host of modern toys
55:25It was made from another new oil-based invention
55:27Plastic
55:30The very fabric of family life
55:33Life was now woven from oil
55:35And we were going to use it like never before
55:44So when you're in a place like this that it really hits you
55:47This, this is oil
55:49You know, I don't mean the energy is just to create this stuff
55:51I mean the material that clothes us, that feeds us
55:54That gives us this kind of paraphernalia of daily life
55:58And by the end of World War II, we had entered the age of hydrocarbon man
56:03And with that was essentially the makings of who we are today
56:10But the world was going to need a lot of oil to feed our new addiction
56:16And as far as the post-war leaders of the Western world were concerned
56:20The Middle East was going to be our key supplier
56:30Britain's oil visionary, Churchill, had already foreseen just how important this region was going to be
56:35And it wasn't long before others saw it too
56:44US President, Roosevelt, had spent much of the war eyeing the Middle East's growing oil reserves
56:52And there was one part of it that interested him more than any of them
57:00One August evening in 1944, before the final bell had even been told on World War II
57:07Britain's ambassador to the US, Lord Halifax, was invited to the White House for dinner with the President
57:14Roosevelt, a little sketch he wanted to show
57:19The President produced a map of the Middle East, under which various lines were drawn
57:23Persian oil, that's yours he said
57:26Iraq and Kuwait we share
57:28But as for Saudi Arabian oil
57:30That's ours
57:32That blunt statement defined America's entire vision of the future
57:36This was going to be an age where politics shaped oil
57:39And where Saudi Arabia fuelled hydrocarbon man
57:48But in their haste, Roosevelt, Churchill and the other self-appointed kings of crude
57:53Had overlooked one important thing
57:58The people whose oil they were taking
58:03Planet oil was about to get political
58:05As Saudi Arabia and much of the Middle East flexed their muscles
58:09And took control of their own oil destiny
58:17Next time, we look at how the most powerful oil superpower the world has ever known came to dominate
58:23The era of a very cheap source of energy is gone
58:27And this is a new era
58:29And how its rise would bring the rest of the world to its knees
58:33The sudden cut-off of oil from the Middle East
58:37Has turned the serious energy shortages we expected this winter
58:41Into a major energy crisis
58:47All three episodes of BBC Radio 4's documentary Oil A Crude History of Britain
58:52Are available to download now using the BBC iPlayer radio app
58:57Stay with us here on BBC 4 for the moment though
58:59We're joining the animals caught up in a seasonal battle for survival next
59:02At the start of our journey through the great British year
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