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.
Oil shale in Estonia (now district of Kiviõli) formed around the mine owned by Eesti Küttejõud. In 1924, the British investor-owned Estonian Oil Development Syndicate Ltd. (later Vanamõisa Oilfields Ltd.) purchased an open-pit mine in Vanamõisa and opened a shale oil extraction plant that was abandoned in 1931 due to technical problems. The Swedish–Norwegian consortium Eestimaa Õlikonsortsium (, ), controlled by Marcus Wallenberg, was founded in Sillamäe in 1926. New Consolidated Gold Fields Ltd. of the United Kingdom built a shale oil extraction plant at Kohtla-Nõmme in 1931. This facility continued to operate until 1961. In 1934, Eesti Kiviõli and New Consolidated Gold Fields