Black Gold:
"And then one day he was shootin' at some food, and up through the ground come a bubblin' crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea." Californy here we come!
My father was an oil man. At least he tried to be, for a while. When I was young, he invested in a local oil exploration company in Ohio. Everyone in the family got free ball caps with the drilling outfit's logo. I remember climbing up the steps on the side of a huge oil tank, where he wrenched open the porthole cover and we peered inside as the oil poured in. Was a sight! And more importantly, what a smell! With tiny me perched up there by his side, my father reached his arm down inside with an empty peanut butter jar and filled her up directly from the gushing pump stream. (What the hell was he thinking?) That jar sat---and settled---on his office desk for many years. Sludge would be a naive appraisal of what was in that jar. Brown sludge. A reminder of an investment in oil that never turned a profit.
But your investment in oil will turn a profit!
The more time you spend around crude oil, the more trouble you will have believing that people actually used to rub this noxious stuff on their bodies as a medicine.
But what about the very best stuff? Light, sweet crude, with a very low sulfur content---really top notch. If you're brave enough to take a sip, it actually tastes sweet.
So you want that oil. But oil prospecting and refining requires a lot of equipment along the way. And that's why this update is one of the largest and most complicated in the history of the game so far. Machines galore.
But when you finally see that black plume shoot toward the sky, you too will dream of striking oil before you die.