Oil and energy
Five real newspaper headlines about oil and energy, printed between 1901 and 2011, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
There are 2 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.
Headline one
The Beaumont Enterprise
1901
On January 10, 1901, drillers at the Spindletop salt dome near Beaumont, Texas, struck oil at enormous pressure, sending a geyser of crude oil shooting 150 feet into the air. The Lucas Gusher produced more oil in a single day than all other US oil wells combined. Spindletop launched a frenzied oil boom that effectively founded the modern petroleum industry and established Texas as an energy powerhouse.
Headline two
The Times
1960
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was founded in Baghdad on September 14, 1960 by Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait. The cartel was created to coordinate petroleum production policies and protect member states' interests against the dominant Western oil companies. OPEC would later dramatically reshape the global economy through the 1973 oil embargo.
Headline three
Financial Times
1986
In early 1986, global oil prices collapsed from over $30 a barrel to below $10 as Saudi Arabia flooded the market in a deliberate strategy to recapture market share and punish non-OPEC producers. The crash devastated oil-dependent economies including the Soviet Union, Norway and Texas. It also significantly destabilised oil-producing nations across the Middle East and Africa.
Headline four
Financial Times
2004
Royal Dutch Shell stunned the oil industry in January 2004 by announcing it had overstated its proven oil and gas reserves by 20%, equivalent to 3.9 billion barrels. The company was forced to restate its reserves four times over the following months, the chairman Sir Philip Watts was fired, and Shell paid $150 million in fines to US and UK regulators. The scandal exposed deep governance failures within one of the world's largest companies.
Headline five
The Guardian
2011
Following the catastrophic Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered a series of equipment failures and meltdowns in three reactors. Over 154,000 residents were evacuated from surrounding areas. It was rated Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale — the same as Chernobyl — and became Japan's worst nuclear accident.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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