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So before then they shipped it around South America? Why not trains I wonder? Seems like a natural precursor to a dedicated pipeline.

• dmoy 2y ago
  They shipped it from the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida/ Cuba, and up the coast to the eastern US. (And there was a lot of Mississippi river <-> ocean traffic too) And some of them got torpedoed by German submarines around there. (E.g. off the coast of Louisiana) No rounding South America involved. > Why not trains Way cheaper to ship by boat up the coast.
  • dmoy 2y ago
    > Way cheaper to ship by boat up the coast. Corollary: one reason we see a mismatch here in modern days is the long term effect of the Jones Act. WWII was only a couple decades after Jones Act, and there was still a huge domestically flagged merchant marine. Today, not so much. It's illegal for a non-US flagged ship to go between two US ports, so we see more done by train.
• dredmorbius 2y ago
  This was Texas (and perhaps Oklahoma and Louisiana) oil. Texas alone produced a huge fraction of the oil used by all parties during WWII, with Russia being the other major supplier. Texas oil shipped from Gulf of Mexico ports (probably Port Arthur, though there may have been others), around Florida, and up the East coast of the US, principally to New Jersey where the major East Coat refineries were. Probably Bayway Refinery, owned and operated by Phillips 66. There was no significant oil transport around South America so far as I'm aware. West-coast oil was supplied out of California, presumably the Pacific Theatre as well.
• bell-cot 2y ago
  My recollection is that they did use trains, at least during the worst parts of the war. (In terms of tanker losses & shortages.) But an oil tanker is vastly more efficient than train full of tanker cars. And the supplies of tanker cars, rail lines, locomotives, & etc. were all pretty constrained.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  The Panama Canal was finished in 1914 so they probably used that (as well).