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Along the steaming, mud-covered delta of Africa's Niger River, bare-chested men labored amid crocodiles and screaming parrots this week to push shafts of steel deep into the earth. On the choppy waters of the Persian Gulf, others perched on a crablike platform and sent a snag-toothed bit boring into the ocean bed. Around the world, hundreds of men labored just as sweatily in 35 other countries — from the pampas of Argentina to the back hills of New Zealand — to probe the earth in an eager quest for the substance that makes the world's wheels go round: oil.
The men on the Niger, the men in New Zealand's back hills are all employees of a single company, Royal Dutch/Shell, the world's second biggest oil company — after Standard Oil (New Jersey) — and by far the most international in scope, organization and spirit. Controlled in partnership by two holding companies, one Dutch (Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.) and one British (Shell Transport & Trading Co., Ltd.), Royal Dutch/Shell is a two-headed creature that owns or partially owns 500 worldwide subsidiaries. Known simply as "Shell" to the public and to the oil industry as "the Group," it produces 14% of the free world's oil.
Today the world not only runs on oil, but has so much that it is practically floating in it; so great is the glut that the world has oil reserves enough for 40 years at present consumption rates, even if no more fields are found. Yet never before has the Group — and all the other giants in the industry — searched so widely for oil. Why?
Oil in the Garden. The answer lies in politics and in the great changes that are sweeping over the world of oil. Oil is not only powering the unprecedented industrial growth of the West; it is also putting many an underdeveloped country on wheels for the first time. Today every nation wants its own oil industry and is determined to have it. Mindful of the oil wealth of the Arab sheiks, all countries suddenly see oil as the key that will open to their treasuries the fabulous riches of the Arabian nights.
Every nation is convinced that it has oil — and who can say otherwise? Once abundant in comparatively few areas of the world (e.g., the Middle East, Venezuela, Texas), oil has been discovered in so many places (e.g., Libya, the Sahara, Europe) that there are few the geologist will flatly mark "no." The Group, after 22 years of searching, has even turned up oil right in its own backyard — two miles from its offices in The Hague, and virtually in the garden of one of its directors.
The scramble for new oil has attracted a swarm of scrappy independent wildcatters — to the great concern of the industry's giants. The independents are drilling all over the world, cutting prices, moving into long-established markets — thanks to a tanker surplus that provides them with dirt-cheap transport. All told, some 250 companies, many of them either new or making their first ventures abroad, are searching for oil in more than 80 countries.