Oil! oil museums in Kern County, California and the libraries and museums in the area around Silver City, New Mexico, as well as the period photography, which played a large part in shaping his screenplay and the film. Oil! Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27 and told as a third-person narrative, with only the opening pages written in the first person. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in Southern California. It is a social and political satire skewering the human foibles of all its characters.
History of the oil shale industry in the United States but lagged farther behind consumption, and net imports of crude oil to the US rose sharply, from 18 million barrels in 1915 to 106 million barrels in 1920. The nation's largest oil shale resource, Green River Formation, was accidentally discovered in 1874. That beds of the Green River Formation could yield oil upon heating had been known for years, but the publication in 1914 of US Geological Survey Bulletin 581, "Oil-Shale in Northwestern Colorado and Northeastern Utah" brought the enormous size of the resource to public attention. Concerned that a coming oil famine could strand the American fleet, in 1912