Offshore Oildom tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, this study reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance.

From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean.

Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.

Praise:

“A brilliant examination of the history of offshore oil cast in a crisply written narrative. Tyler Priest forces readers to think anew about the politics of industry, states’ rights, the environment, and American expansion, showing us why he’s one of our preeminent energy scholars.” ~Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

“With both precision and breadth, Tyler Priest provides an engrossing account of the legal, social, and political events that shaped the rich federal oil kingdom off the U.S. coasts. He likens this oildom’s creation to ‘a smoldering political and legal potato, scorched from all sides’ by coastal states battling the feds in court and in Congress, a polarized battle that continues to this day.” ~Jacqueline L. Weaver, professor emerita of law, University of Houston Law Center

“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 U.S. industry was created not only by innovation, creative engineering, and complex execution; it was also the result of fierce political battles.” ~Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“In writing Offshore Oildom, Tyler Priest has amassed a stunning amount of information on the emergence of U.S. offshore oil production, utilizing scores of oral interviews and extensive archival and official records scattered across the country. The result, more than two decades in the making, is a masterpiece in American energy history. No thoughtful discussion of energy resource development can ignore this deeply researched landmark study.” ~Jay Hakes, author of The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush