Drilling Ahead: The Quest for Oil in the Deep South, 1945-2005.

Drilling Ahead: The Quest for Oil in the Deep South, 1945-2005. By Alan Cockrell. (Jackson: Published by University Press of Mississippi for the Mississippi Geological Society, c. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 301. $35.00, ISBN 1-57806-811-8.)

Alan Cockrell's Drilling Ahead: The Quest for Oil in the Deep South, 1945-2005 serves as a sequel to Dudley Hughes's Oil in the Deep South: A History of Oil Exploration in Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, 1889-1945 (Jackson, Miss., 1993). It is a highly accessible, often colorful, account of oil exploration and development in Mississippi, Alabama, and northwest Florida, in the post-World War II period. While Cockrell's book will find its greatest audience among specialists in the petroleum industry, it has been written in such a way as to be accessible to a more general audience. In setting the tone for the book, the author notes, "The oil heritage of the Deep South belongs to all its citizens, and I want them to enjoy in full measure the fascinating world of petroleum exploration" (p. xi). Cockrell, a former geologist, writes with authority about the geological processes that made oil exploration in the Deep South a possibility as well as about the social, economic, and biographical circumstances that compelled the region's most important figures, including Robert Womack, Emmett Vaughey, Bill Vaughey, Everett Eaves, and Phil LaMoreaux, to pursue oil and gas development there. Cockrell complements his text with very helpful geological illustrations and charts and a glossary defining geological and industry-related terms for lay readers. The biographical nature of the book is also reflected in the large collection of black and white photographs of the book's protagonists.

Cockrell's text is divided chronologically into five periods, generally coinciding with new industry trends. In developing the narrative, Cockrell uses an episodic and biographical approach to the industry. This approach generally emphasizes the impact of individuals on the industry and offers significant background information concerning these men and women, including the large contribution that Texas- and Oklahoma-trained individuals made to oil exploration in Mississippi and Alabama. Cockrell supplements this narrative format with periodic analyses of regional development in light of national and international developments in the oil industry, including the emergence of OPEC and the imposition of price controls in the early 1970s. However, the book is predominantly a composite biographical narrative of the industry. In that mode, the author achieves a fair geographical balance in discussing the evolution of drilling and exploration in Mississippi and Alabama, with less extensive coverage of developments in northwestern Florida. In terms of his sources, Cockrell relies almost exclusively on oral histories that he and Dudley Hughes completed with individuals chronicled in the book.

Ultimately, Drilling Ahead is important for the history of energy development in the South because of its emphasis on the individuals who changed the industry in a region that lives in the shadows of the oil industry of Louisiana and Texas. Through anecdotal sequences, Cockrell brings the development of the Mississippi Interior Salt Basin, Black Warrior Basin (straddling the Mississippi/Alabama state line), Mobile Bay, and numerous other locations, to life.

EVAN R. WARD

University of North Alabama