"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?"
Probably, because you still had to build and run the tankers, which would not necessarily been cheaper than shipping the oil by rail - the usual method before Big Mistake 2. Another thing is whether the ports in Venezuela of the time could have handled large tankers - the tankers used in the Curacao run were specially built with shallow drafts, which led to problems replacing the ones that got sunk by U-Boats during WW2.
The late David Brown pointed out that another thing about the drop in naval construction during the interwar period were the subcontractors that manufactured the various components shrank as much, if not more, than the shipyards handling naval construction. Much of those contractors could not have been repurposed for producing components for, say, tanker, and still be much use for naval construction.
I have to dig out my copies of Nelson to Vanguard and The Prize and re-read them sometime.
C.T.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Richard Aiken" <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
To: tml <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Date: 05/15/18 21:28
Subject: Re: [TML] HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier
wrote:The naval treaties of the 20s and 30s were . . . terrible for UK's shipMaybe they should have gotten into bed with Standard Oil and started
builders, especially those specialising in large military vessels, as
demand dried up completely.
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?