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 reserves in the United States four sites on the Gulf of Mexico, with a total capacity of of crude oil. The maximum total withdrawal capability from the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve is per day. This is roughly 32% of US oil imports, or 75% of imports from OPEC. Services under the U.S. Department of the Interior estimate the total volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the United States to be roughly . Over 1 million exploratory and developmental crude oil wells have already been drilled in the US since 1949. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates undiscovered technically recoverable crude oil onshore