Abstract One hundred years ago, standards in geological report writing were formalized within the Royal Dutch Shell Group. Chief Geologist Josef Theodor Erb defined these standards in an internal report aimed at geologists working for Shell subsidiaries. His purpose was to raise the level of scientific reporting and to provide a measure of uniformity in geological reports sent to head office from all parts of the world. Ultimately, ‘Uniformity in Geological Reports’ was to allow the chief geologist to readily identify and follow-up on the better business opportunities. With time, Erb’s report developed into the Shell ‘Standard Legend’. Erb’s career is symptomatic of a developing company culture, which he embraced as his life’s goal. Realizing the shortcomings of this narrow personal philosophy of life may have been at the root of the mental problems that led to his death.

Abstract This chapter presents a collection of first-generation Swiss geologists, who, around 1900, went abroad in order to work for oil organizations, both public and private. With the rise of oil exploration after 1900, the demand for experienced oil geologists grew rapidly. Oil companies started hiring trained geologists from different parts of the world, which led to an increasing number of Swiss geologists finding employment abroad. One of the first to start his career abroad was Carl Schmidt (1862–1923) from Basel, highly esteemed and later renowned for his achievements as a teacher of younger oil geologists. Another was Josef Erb (1874–1934), who accomplished an unparalleled career at Royal Dutch Shell. Other examples include Hans Hirschi (1876–1964), who worked for the Union des Pétroles d’Oklahoma for a few years, and Arnold Heim (1882–1965), working nearly 50 years for major oil companies. Many more followed over the decades to come, so that virtual successions took place between them: specific territories and specific companies were ‘handed down’ between geologists of the same nationality. Where once the Swiss were employed, others took over; the pioneers acted as door-openers for future generations.

Abstract The history of the European oil and gas industry reflects local and global political events, economic constraints, and the personal endeavours of individual petroleum geoscientists, as much as it does the development of technologies and the underlying geology of the region. Europe and Europeans played a disproportionately large role in the development of the modern global oil and gas industry. From at least the Iron Age until the 1850s, the use of oil in Europe was limited, and the oil was obtained almost exclusively from surface seeps and mine workings. The use of oil increased in the 1860s with the introduction of new technologies in both production and refining. Shale oil was distilled on a commercial scale in various parts of Europe in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century but, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the mineral oils and gas produced primarily from shale and coal could no longer satisfy demand, and oil produced directly from conventional oil fields began to dominate the European market. The first commercial oil wells in Europe were manually dug in Poland in 1853, Romania in 1857, Germany in 1859 and Italy in 1860, before the gradual introduction of mechanical cable drilling rigs started in the early 1860s. In the late nineteenth century, the northern part of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Poland and Ukraine was one of the most prolific hydrocarbon provinces in the world. The Bóbrka Field in the Carpathian foothills of Poland, discovered in 1853, is still producing and is now the oldest industrial oil field in the world. The 1914–18 and 1939–45 world wars were both major drivers in exploration for and exploitation of Europe’s oil resources and in the development of technologies to produce synthetic fuels from the liquefaction of bituminous coal and the combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen as the Allied and Axis governments struggled to maintain adequate supplies of fuel for their war efforts. In Britain, the first ‘accidental’ discovery of gas was made in 1875 in the Weald Basin, but it was not until 1919 that Britain’s first oil field was discovered at Hardstoft, in Derbyshire, as a result of a government-funded exploration drilling campaign, triggered by the need to find indigenous supplies of oil during World War I. The period of reconstruction after World War II was also critical for the European oil and gas industry with further successful exploration for oil and gas in the East Midlands of England resulting in Britain’s first ‘oil boom’, and the discovery and development of deep gas fields in the Po Valley in northern Italy fuelling the Italian economy for the next 50 years. Drilling technologies developed during Britain’s first oil boom, together with the extrapolation of the onshore geology of the East Midlands oil fields and of the Dutch gas fields, led to the discovery of the huge oil and gas resources beneath the North Sea in the 1960s and 1970s, which enabled Britain, Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands to be largely self-sufficient in oil and gas from the late 1970s until production began to decline rapidly in the early 2000s. Today, oil and gas production in most European countries is at an historical low. Exploration for new sources of oil and gas in Europe continues, although increasingly hampered by the maturity of many of the conventional oil and gas plays, but European companies and European citizens continue to play a major role in the global oil and gas industry.