JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 167
In 1919, at the end of WWI, The Illustrated London News asked (and answered) the vital question of the day in the coal v. oil dispute and the feeding of its navy: which power source will last longer? The graphic designer displayed the answer right there at the top: American oil would last about 30 years, while its coal reserves would go for another 4,000 years. The bigger question though was about the oil production and futures for the rest of the world, which was left unanswered (and unanswerable, smartly). Its easy to second guess these guys and have a stab and a poke at their predictive power, but we’ve been getting the answers to these questions wrong every decade since then. Suffice to say that the Brits were doing some strategic thinking on the issue of power supply, which of course is probably the greatest issue in fielding an army of navy (just ask Rommel). 
It is interesting to note that the British government was busily looking for oil in Derbyshire (oops) and other places. And as an end-note it is stated that the government had already invested about 2 million pounds in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would become British Petroleum in 1957, known today as BP), which, beginning around 1908, was the first time that a company harvested the oil reserves of the Middle East. All of it was nationalized during the Iranian coup d’etat in 1953
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