Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 96 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 878 Oil industry Global Resources of alternative energy schemes Exxon for example invested 5 billion in its oil-from-shale project in Colony Colorado and the acquisition of holdings in such other energy sectors as coal and uranium. These companies would do much the same vis-à-vis biofuels in the high-cost-petroleum era that followed the . invasion of Iraq in 2003. The downturn in the price of oil in the 1980 s caused the majors to shut down most of their alternative energy projects and to seek means for surviving in the lean years of the global recession. As these companies would do in even more publicized ventures during the 1990 s when the price of oil remained in the twenty-five-dollar-per-barrel range many turned to mergers in order to economize beginning with the 1984 merger between SoCal and Gulf Oil that enabled Gulf to sell off many of its subsidiaries and service stations and led SoCal to change its name to Chevron. A decade later what had been exceptional in 1984 became momentarily almost commonplace. The process began in December 1998 when British Petroleum BP acquired Amoco formerly the American Oil Company or Standard Oil of Indiana for more than 50 billion. The following year the combined corporation purchased ARCO one of the major players in the discover y of Alaskan oil . Combined with its subsequent acquisition of Burmah Castrol a lubricant manufacturing company BP was able to pare approximately twenty thousand jobs worldwide and become temporarily the world s largest oil company. BP held that distinction for only a few months until Exxon and Mobil merged in November 1999 into the largest corporation in the world. The transaction enabled the combined corporation to sell off more than seventeen hundred ser vice stations to Tosco and trim its payroll by nearly ten thousand employees. The merger mania did not end there or on the United States side of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1999 two giant European petroleum firms France s Total and Belgium s .
