US short of oil

That is a misconception. A lot of people thought so because gasoline was rationed in the US. The purpose of rationing, as well as a 35 MPH speed limit was to conserve rubber (for tires), which was in short supply since the main provider of natural rubber, SE Asia, was under Japanese control. The US had bountiful domestic supplies of oil as well as imports from Venezuela. It was only after the war that the Middle East oil became a factor in US needs, but even today, only 16% of the US oil needs are met by imported oil, most of it from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Mexico. Very little comes from the Middle East.

That is another misconception! Rationing was introduced as a propaganda type ploy to put the American public in a wartime frame of mind. There was never any real shortages of critical materials.

You may have picked up an error here. Rubber was in critically short supply after the Japanese conquest of Malaya. Besides, the USA had no domestic sources of tungsten, uranium, and some other 'critical materials.'

While some rationing might indeed have been propaganda, the Allies were not immune from shortages. The Japanese occupied the main rubber-producing areas, for example, and so there was at least the potential of a major shortage of rubber.

In addition, shipping was tight throughout the war, and so there were things that were available somewhere in the world that were not imported into the US in unlimited quantities. I would imagine that production of aluminum for civilian needs would be a very low priority, with all the aluminum needed for aircraft and the need to bring it all in by ship.

The purpose of the speed limit was indeed to conserve rubber, as the US had zero rubber manufacturing capacity and the main production areas (Burma) were falling under Japanese control. Later in the war, the US developped a sizeable synthetic rubber manufacturing capacity.

However, gasoline rationing was also intended to conserve... gasoline. Just because the US were a major oil producer doesn't mean that they could afford to burn gas as if there was no tomorrow.

Look at it this way: in 1944, SHAEF had a few thousands of vehicles burning prodigious amounts of fuel all over NW Europe. The same thing was happening in Italy. The forces involved there were using more trucks than the late 1930's US peacetime economy (plus keep in mind that the US economy still had to keep going, and even increase, which used gas). Your typical air raid featured 4-500 B-17's & B-24's, plus about twice as many escorts, that's 3,000 particularly oil-guzzling engines. When you add the normal tactical sorties, training flights, ground infrastructure, the oil cost of the air war as waged by the US/UK was simply staggering, and quite out of reach of

This may be a misinterpretation of a number events.

1. Gasoline rationing. When rationing to conserve fuel was instituted on the US East Coast in May of 1943, it was vehemently protested, especially since Americans at that time considered unfettered access to unlimited quantities of gasoline, and unrestricted use of their automobiles, to be a God-given right. This unnerved the Roosevelt administration in its plans to introduce rationing on a nationwide basis. They serendipitiously found a way to 'back door' that program under the guise of a program based on the (real) need to conserve rubber. As it was, the political 'hot potato' rationing scheme still needed to wait until after the 1942 congressional elections before being enacted., and even then 100 congressmen (mostly from the wide-open spaces of the Western US) protested. As it was, a further scheme in 1943 to ban all 'non-essential' automobile travel crashed and burned in a barrage of semantics and never went into effect.

2. An article published in 1943 by FDR's Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, titled 'We're Running Out of Oil!!', which in stating that 'WW III will be fought with imported oil' was actually an analysis of US domestic oil reserves and a look at the need for conservation in the future. The US was at the time of the article producing over 60% of the world's oil with no reasonable expectation of being unable to continue to do so for the duration of the war.

3. Shortage of gasoline on the Western front. Despite the failure of PLUTO, there was no shortage of gasoline in the ETO, it was just that it was in the wrong place (Normandy) in late summer of 1944. Transportation problems (the Allies had moved 260 'logistic planning days' in three weeks) led to logistical nightmares (an INFANTRY division utilized 187,000 horsepower when on the move) and controversial allocation decisions (3rd Army, for example, was down to 1/10th in normal supply the end of August) that are being second-guessed still today.

Fully one half of all war materiel shipping from the US in WW2 consisted of petroleum products, and US refineries produced more than 90% of all the 100 octane avgas used by the Allies, reaching, in 1945, levels 7 times as high as had been forecast in 1942. It would be hard to overstate the accomplishments of the US petroleum industry in WW2.

In answer to another part of your question, the entire American presence in the Saudi Arabian oil fields during the war was reduced to a miniscule number of technicians (the famous '100 men' whose jobs were devoted, not to exploration or exploitation, but to the protection (plugging) of the existing oil wells and the possible destruction of them in the event of an Axis occupation. Although the estimates of Saudi oil reserves (and all those of the Middle East) were studied and revised upward during the war, they never really figured into the math while the war was in progress. Aramco didn't exist at the time. 'Casoc', the child of Standard of California and Texaco did, but they balked at advancing money against future production to the Saudis (who were in a cash crunch at the time) when future production was uncertain. With a eye to the future, US government money was funnelled to the Saudi royal family under the guise of aid from the British (in whose sphere of political influence the Saudi's traveled.),

Regards,

PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) can hardly be described as a failure. This flexible pipeline was complete and pumping oil in bulk from the UK to Normandy by D+13 and connected to a network of pumps and pipes which eventually terminated in Bocholt in Germany. 94 million gallons of POL travelled via PLUTO in WW2, about a third of all POL imported into Normandy by 21 Army Group. A British infantry division consumed nearly 37,000 gallons of POL every day.