Aramco, an acronym for Arabian American Oil Company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco Any chance they would have NEVER even known what was down there?
"Never" is a long time. A Pennsylvanian discovered oil, in the sense of drilling for it, in the first place. The first explorers for oil in Texas were from that eastern crowd - probably, if left to their own devices, the Texans would still be sitting on their oil along with the Saudis.
If left to their own devices, the Saudis wouldn't have had the means or desire to ever discover the vast wealth they had the good fortune to be sitting on.
What a crock of racist shit. That's just like saying that the stupid Euros would never have developed Algebra on their own.
The problem wasn't discovering it. The first oil in the gulf was discovered in Bahrain. Oil deposits seep to the surface, and Arabs on Bahrain had been using the resulting tar for 5,000 years. There are also characteristic salt domes which any geologic survey would have noticed. The first wells were sunk in 1932, and the stuff was not hard to find. The problems were 1. Transportation. Even if there was a sea of oil. How to get it to somewhere that needed oil. 2. Concessions. Getting the permission to drill. 3. Cost. While Oil was gushing out of the ground in unlimited quantities in the US, why would they go half way round the world to Arabia. I'm willing to be corrected on this, but I'll guess that it was when the "Gushers" ran out that the US oil companies started looking further afield.
Daniel Yergin's book The Prize , and the PBS series that followed it, are both great introductions to this subject.
