The main reason for oil-computing spillovers is that the semiconductor industry and the digital electronic programmable computer came into being exactly as oil extraction was becoming much more technologically intensive. From the 1950s onward, new sources of oil could only be found in increasingly difficult political and physical environments: the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, North Slope of Alaska, Arabian Peninsula, and so on. Thus, oil companies grabbed technological advantages to overcome competitors, rentier states, and a recalcitrant Earth. Computing aided everything from designing offshore oil rigs to analyzing seismic data to predicting future prices to automating refineries. Before long, the oil industry existentially depended upon digital technologies to maintain profits and continue expanding operations. Drilling in the North Sea, for instance, could not have extended into deep offshore waters if not for advances in software for controlling pipeline flows.
Oil companies also used computing to obtain political advantage. In particular, from the late 1960s onward, the largest producers headquartered in Western Europe and the United States faced growing demands from “petrostates” in the Global South for a greater share of revenues. Thus, where the majors earlier dismissed talk of scarcity or “peak oil,” by the late 1960s, a few oil actors were sponsoring and publicizing forecasts that oil would become precipitously more expensive and harder to access. Computer modeling helped legitimate forecasting as a modern and objective practice. Oil firms had already adopted computer models for internal use: “The Sun Oil Corporate Financial Model developed … between 1965 and 1968 was the first large-scale model ever built; it was also an abject failure which was completely abandoned in 1969.” Sun’s model was superseded by the Industrial Dynamics model developed by Whirlwind inventor Jay Forrester, which led the Club of Rome to commission Forrester to model global resource scarcity; several Club members (Frits Böttcher, Maurice Strong, Joseph Slater) were current or former oil or gas executives, as were close allies of the Club such as George Mitchell and Robert Anderson. The resulting World3 model underlay the Club’s bestselling 1972 Limits to Growth report, which spurred a global debate about scarcity to which oil firms were very much interested parties. Oil companies also developed alternatives to Industrial Dynamics, such as scenario planning and long-range planning, that were not necessarily computing intensive. Shell’s scenario planning approach, in particular, proved immensely popular among Silicon Valley techno-optimists who were skeptical of Limits to Growth.