On a dream – and a bit too close to her garden – the old wooden derrick was skidded to its third location on Mrs. Daisy Bradford’s 970 acre, East Texas farm… this would be the one.

Knowledgeable but squabbling geologists; summary dismissals; camel transport; ‘lagoonal’ oil; and 40m-high gushers. All in a day’s work for the first oil explorers in Iraq.

Formed just as the first discoveries were being made in the North Sea, the Petroleum Society of Great Britain’s mission is to promote, for the public benefit, education in the scientific and technical aspects of petroleum exploration.

2014 marks the centenary of the beginning of World War One. The Great War, as it was generally referred to in Europe, heralded a major shift in political power across the Western World, Asia and Africa. It also witnessed the emergence of the modern oil and gas industry.

A prelude to the great discoveries of the North Sea, the onshore oilfields provide a fascinating insight into the history of UK oil.

East Africa is the emerging hydrocarbon province of the 21st Century - but it is worth remembering that this success comes after six decades of unsuccessful exploration.

In 2003, the fall of Saddam Hussein opened up semi-autonomous Kurdistan to foreign investment. It also revived the interest of oil companies in the region, which had been explored, but not developed, by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) between 1946 and 1961.

A consortium of four oil majors (today’s BP, Shell, Total and ExxonMobil) and oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) was designed to explore and extract oil in the Middle East. Amid controversy about its role as the ‘Red Line Cartel’, its pioneering contribution to the oil development of the region is often overlooked.

The recent shale gas boom is a reminder that the effective use of hydraulic fracturing in shale formations is a relatively new phenomenon. However, this ‘fracking’ (also called 'fracing’ or ‘fraccing’ in the technical literature) has been around for longer than many people realise, and the use of unconventional techniques to extract oil and gas from the ground has developed over more than 150 years.

Yemen is a land of physical contrasts, bounded by mountains, desert and sea. It includes the Socotra archipelago and various islands in the Red Sea. At the heart of the south, like a deep gash across the land, is the Hadhramaut Valley. The geology of the region intrigued the early explorers, as it continues to do today. They had to overcome considerable political and physical difficulties as well as grapple with a complex geological puzzle that had its origins in the breakup of Gondwanaland.

“A woman with a genius for affairs – it may sound paradoxical, but the fact exists. If Mrs. Emma A. Summers were less than a genius she could not, as she does today, control the Los Angeles oil markets.” – The San Francisco Call, July 21, 1901

For such a small country, Bahrain certainly knows how to make an impression on the world. It is currently celebrating the 80th anniversary of the first discovery of oil in the Arabian Gulf

Nearly declared dead by its owners only eight years after discovery, new technologies introduced over the past century allowed Southern California’s Belridge Field to grow into a prolific oil producer. Now, 101 years since that discovery, innovative insights into its varied reservoirs promise to keep Belridge productive well into the 21st century.

A discovery at Yibal in April 1962 marked the end of a long and frustrating search for commerical oil in the Sultanate of Oman. The country is now 24th in the global oil production table with reserves of about 5.5 Bbo.

Petroleum geology textbooks have been an essential tool for training generations of teachers, researchers, explorers, and managers in the petroleum industry. Here we look at some of the early textbooks in this field as a way of paying tribute to these works and their authors, upon whose shoulders stand the writers, teachers and textbooks of our time.