In chapter 12 of Rogan's book, titled "The Age of Oil," we are reminded that oil (and economic energy* in general) is not a purely economic object. Thus, microeconomic theorizing on constrained extractable resources like oil (Hotelling, etc.) are rendered at most mathematically interesting, but irrelevant on a geopolitical scale charged by ancient culture wars and religious conflict.
In his history, Rogan quotes a 1960s American-educated Saudi technocrat, Abdullah al-Turayqi, as advocating for Arabs' use of the "oil weapon" against Israel and its Western allies. Rogan summarizes the results of the October War and the 1973-74 oil embargo:
...the Arab world did make significant gains in 1973. The display of discipline and unity of purpose impressed the international community and forced the superpowers to take the Arab world more seriously. On an economic level, the events of 1973 led to full Arab independence from the Western oil companies. In Shaykh Yamani's words, the Arab oil states had asserted mastery over their own commodity and came out of the oil crisis immensely wealthier. Oil, which had traded at less than $3 a barrel before the 1973 crisis, stabilized at prices ranging from $11-13 for most of the 1970s. If Western cartoonists vilified the oil shaykh as a greedy hook-nosed character holding the world to ransom, Western businessmen were quick to flock to an emerging maket of seemingly limitless resources. Even the Western oil companies had reaped enormous profits from the crisis, as their vast oil reserves appreciated with the spike in prices. Yet the evens of October 1973 dealt the final blow to the oil concessions that had governed relations between Western companies and the Arab oil-producing states. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia followed Iraq and Libya in buying out the assets of Western oil companies for their national oil industries, bringing the age of the Western influence over Arab oil to a close by 1976.
As Rogan demonstrates, the realities precipitated by the existence of oil reserves in the Middle East navigated the tense political circumstances between Arabs and Israelis, the two Cold War superpowers, and the two-front battle Palestinians were fighting with both Israel and Arab rivals like Jordan and Israel. Western imperialism, religious identity and Arab nationalism all proved much more influential forces on oil dynamics than anything rudimentary natural resource economics teaches us.
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*As we know, there are many different forms of energy - too many to summarize here. When I refer to "economic energy," I mean energy used by humans in the form of hydrocarbons (oil, coal and natural gas), electricity produced by renewables, biomass, etc.
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