ABSTRACT
This chapter explains three-quarters of century of the teaching of Petroleum Geology at the Royal School of Mines in London, it seems appropriate to review in it the remarkable growth of the world oil industry over the same period. The United States (US) proportion of this total was 63.9%, while that of the Middle East was negligible, since the first oilfield to be found in Iran had only been discovered in 1908, and was not yet exporting. Mexico was second only to the United States of America (USA), and for the first time the Middle East (Iran) was contributing an appreciable proportion of the world total. The rapid increase in world production during the last few decades has surprisingly been parallelled - even outstripped - by the increase in estimated world oil “reserves”, i.e. the unproduced volumes of oil which have been “proved” to exist in the subsurface, but which have not yet been extracted.
