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Toward the end of World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attended a summit that changed the course of world history. No, net the famous meeting at Yalta, with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. Immediately after that gathering, Roosevelt traveled quietly to the USS Quincy, anchored in the Red Sea. The man he met there had rarely set foot outside his home country and insisted on bringing an entourage of dozens, which included his household slaves and a royal astrologer. He did not preside over a vast nation, he was not a significant world ruler, but he was in command of the greatest store of the one commodity the modern world needed more than anything else: oil. He was King Ibn Sa‘üd, father of the new country of Saudi Arabia, home to the biggest reserves of oil on the planet, then as now.

That this meeting should take place in the closing months of World War-II was not surprising. Unlike World War I, which was a tragic story of static conflict, blood, and mud, World War II was one of movement. Trucks, tanks, and all sorts of vehicles played a central role in most battles. Access to petroleum was woven into every strand of strategy. The Japanese bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in part to try to break the embargo that was limiting its supplies of oil and rubber from Southeast Asia. Hitler’s mad, fateful dash to Stalingrad was partly to secure access to Caspian and Romanian oil. Rommel was driven out of Africa by the British and American armies, lamenting the fact that lack of gasoline had limited his maneuvers. Oil had emerged as a major strategic element. 

Excerpted from Page 139-140 of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran