The Moose told Sonoco to get lost in the late '30s so the Italian 'experts' could find that oil.
They didn't.
Can you elaborate? Sonoco seems to be a packaging company. Sunoco is an oil company but seems to be have been mainly refining and distribution rather than drilling. Socony was one of the mega players but I can’t manage to turn up anything relating to pre-war Libya. Sinclair seem to have been tight with Mussolini in the twenties but again I can’t find anything about exploration. The timeline certainly fits but regardless, if there were any western oil companies there they didn’t find any more than the Italians.
I did turn up a very obscure thesis which had some background and a reminder of one
very significant issue - Italy at first didn’t control much outside the ports, and then had a full-on war of colonisation going on until 1934, complete with depopulation, concentration camps, chemical warfare, etc etc etc. So without major changes the window is pretty tight for the OP.
evidence of oil and gas were detected and reported in water drilling holes as far back as 1914. Results like this showed up repeatedly as agricultural colonization expanded in the hinterlands of Tripoli and Benghazi.84 News of these findings made its way to the governor of Libya, Italo Balbo. Balbo, in turn, charged a commission of geologists led by Ardito Desio with the task of drawing up a plan of action. Desio had worked extensively in Libya on several oc- casions between 1932 and 1935 and knew the country well. The commission recommended explorations explicitly looking for oil, at which point Mussolini himself got involved. In a telegram dated August 4th 1937 he directs the director of agip, Umberto Puppini, to organize petroleum searches in collaboration with Balbo and Minister of Italian Africa Alessandro Lessona.85
The reasons why Mussolini would take such personal interest in what were ad- mittedly quite marginal findings could be threefold: first, oil was high on the agenda. While Italy had managed to circumvent international commodities sanctions brought to bear on it after the Second Italian-Ethiopian War of 1935–36, there was no guarantee it would successfully do so again. Second, preparations for a potential European-wide conflict were increasingly visible in the second half of the 1930s, a war for which resource-poor Italy would not be well suited. Third, the Italian navy had been building up towards ship parity with its French counterpart since the early 19th century, and oil was gradually replac- ing coal as combustion for these newer ships.86 The importance on Italy’s part of finding petroleum and finding it fast can be shown by the fact that agip initiated oil explorations in Ethiopia before the fighting there had even ended.
Acting on Mussolini’s instructions, in the fall of 1937 Puppini and agip asked Desio and his commission to finalize a research plan and budget. The latter turned out to be an initial stumbling block, as the exploration bill of an estimated six million Italian lire was passed along from one entity to another.88 Finally the Ministry of Finance agreed to cover the outlays, but it had cost the process an additional six months of bureaucratic wrangling. Such time wasted would prove to have been crucial, as we shall see below.
So starting March 1938 the AGIP crews started poking around in western Libya and struck out. By May they are starting to think about moving east. Work in Tripolitania comes to a halt in spring 1940 and the war prevents any move on to the next target area which is Cyrenaica. Supposedly the area around Agedabia was Desios specific interest and the discovery well came in less than 150km from there 20 years later, although that does sound like the end of a drinking story TBH.
OTL - start 1938, nine dry holes in 2 years, six million lire spent, almost got as far as looking in one of the right places.
ATL - start 1934 because ??? and start looking somewhere different because ??? Drill 3-4 dry holes while spending 3 million lire to hit one of the oil fields in 1935.
It doesn’t seem completely impossible, although why would they be in such a tearing hurry to get in there as soon as the shooting stopped? This is now a year or two
before Mussolini’s introduction to oil sanctions rather than a couple of years
after. However this and the bureaucratic inertia etc could maybe be handwaved away with “will of the Duce!” . Apparently for the 37-38 fiscal year Libya guzzled up 12% of the entire Italian budget so it’s not like they were shy about flushing money down that particular toilet.
Be bloody funny though if AGIP hit oil just in Cyrenaica as Mussolini declares war and then the brits get to hear of it. Can you imagine the shenanigans?
Thesis with a bit of background.
https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/ha...is_Mathias_H_Tj-nn.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y