New book ‘Offshore Oildom’ charts political battles behind US offshore oil industry
Historian Tyler Priest has published a major new account of the origins and evolution of the US offshore oil and gas industry.
In Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean, Priest draws on extensive new sources to show how the industry emerged from ambitious efforts to bring submerged lands under US control and develop them for petroleum production.
The book explores the complex legal, political, and social conflicts that defined this expansion, from the tidelands controversy of the 1930s–1950s through the energy crises of the 1970s.These developments created lasting tensions between coastal and inland states, industry operators and federal regulators, energy needs and environmental concerns, and domestic policy and international relations.
Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, said: “Tyler Priest, a preeminent historian of energy and the environment, explores how a single well drilled off a pier near Santa Barbara in 1898 gave rise to a major American industry—offshore oil and gas. In spirited prose, Priest demonstrates how this US industry was created not only by innovation, creative engineering, and complex execution; it was also the result of fierce political battles.”
The book is available in hardcover and e-book formats from LSU Press.
Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and served in 2010 as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
About the Author
Bruce Beaubouef
Managing Editor
Bruce Beaubouef is Managing Editor for Offshore magazine. In that capacity, he plans and oversees content for the magazine; writes features on technologies and trends for the magazine; writes news updates for the website; creates and moderates topical webinars; and creates videos that focus on offshore oil and gas and renewable energies. Beaubouef has been in the oil and gas trade media for 25 years, starting out as Editor of Hart’s Pipeline Digest in 1998. From there, he went on to serve as Associate Editor for Pipe Line and Gas Industry for Gulf Publishing for four years before rejoining Hart Publications as Editor of PipeLine and Gas Technology in 2003. He joined Offshore magazine as Managing Editor in 2010, at that time owned by PennWell Corp. Beaubouef earned his Ph.D. at the University of Houston in 1997, and his dissertation was published in book form by Texas A&M University Press in September 2007 as The Strategic Petroleum Reserve: U.S. Energy Security and Oil Politics, 1975-2005.