Indeed, but interestingly enough the book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, only has 9 mentions of the word computer and zero for supercomputer.
From the authors Bio: "Daniel Yergin is the author of the bestseller The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World which has been hailed as “a fascinating saga” about the “quest for sustainable resources of energy,” and “the book you must read to understand the future of our economy and our way of life,” ..."
So it's more a book to persuade (feelings) than inform (facts) - no wonder they aren't mentioned.
The book is loaded with facts. It just doesn't focus on the computational aspect (more focus on the geopolitical details). I strongly recommend this book- I understood a lot more about modern power after reading The Quest and The Prize.
Actually, the news for me is that Oil & Gas exploration still has needs for computing that's considered significant today.
Basically, I can see that they needed super computers in the 80s. But I might have assumed that their computing needs wouldn't keep scaling with supply. So that by now, just renting some GPUs from Amazon might be enough.
A former employer of mine had lots of oil companies as clients for their CFD software...for most of the problem sets, the memory use was in the TBs, and it's tough to get a GPU with more than 16-24GB of onboard RAM.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...