Americas: petroleum production 1860-1988, by country
From the 1860s until the late-1900s, the United States was the largest producer of crude petroleum in the world, with annual production in the given period peaking at more than 400 million tons after the late 1960s. From the 1910s onward, Venezuela also emerged as one of the world's major oil producers, and it became the third-largest oil producer in the world by the 1940s (behind the U.S. and USSR). The spike in U.S. production in 1973 was a result of the