April 1972 the Texas Railroad Commission lifted its limits on the state’s output and hence surrendered its control of the price that it had held since the 1930s. In 1971, Algeria and Libya began to nationalize their oil production, and Iraq followed in 1972, the same year that Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia began their gradual takeover of their oilfields—which until that point had been in the hands of foreign corporations. Then in April 1973, the US ended its limits on the import of crude oil east of the Rocky Mountains. Suddenly, it was a sellers’ market, and on October 1 1973 OPEC raised
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