August 27 marks 150 years since the first commercially-successful oil well was drilled in
The people backing the venture were not after the oil
Some nine years before, a Pennsylvania farmer had devised a way to distill the crude oil that pooled on the surface of his streams. Natural oil seeps always had been found worldwide and were used throughout history by ship builders to coat the bottoms of ships (pitch). The newly refined product was called "carbon oil" to distinguish it from the coal-based kerosene which had been developed earlier in the century and, because of the soot it created, not ideal for indoor use.
The Titusville "carbon oil" inaugurated a new era of oil-based kerosene lamps and stoves but hardly stopped with domestic uses. Along with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation, it literally fueled the next phase of the industrial revolution and, with no exaggeration, world development.
Titusville wasn't the first attempt at drilling an oil well; others in the area had tried but only ended up only with salt water. Nor was it the most successful. But it did mark a Gladwell-worthy tipping point.
Today oil is a global multi-trillion dollar business by any calculation and the world produces about 85 million b/d.
Crude oil is a nation-building, strategic geopolitical asset, and is not only the world's most actively traded physical commodity but the linchpin of many numerous derivative industries including transportation, plastics and pharmaceuticals.
Pennsylvania still produces oil but is no longer the epicenter of production, the honor of which goes to Saudi Arabia, whose capacity in excess of 10 million b/d makes it the world's largest producer and exporter of total petroleum liquids. By most accounts, it holds at least one-fifth of the world's reserves.
Oil is not yet in short supply, and the industry as a whole has consistently found more resources than it has tapped, and governments around the world have long set as a goal attempting to reduce their use of petroleum-based products, for a variety of reasons: security, costs, politics. More recently, one of the most commonly held long-term goals is to reduce the emissions resulting from the use of oil, both by improving the processing and use of oil and gas, and by finding substitutes.
Some of the substitutes are subject to various tax incentives in many countries. And oil and its derivatives are in the cross-hairs of the kind of new excise schemes that would make the taxes on Civil War-era alcohol look inconsequential, ranging from international bunker fuel emissions to cap-and-trade regulations in the US.
With many searching for tomorrow's whale oil, likely contenders could be found in laboratories, air or coincidentally, even the salt water that early drillers for oil were so disappointed to strike. Given history, it may be something not even conceived at present.
Pennsylvania is now a bit player in the oil game, producing approximately 7/100ths of one percent of Saudi's annual crude production. However, it's a reminder that tomorrow's Titusville has yet to be identified.
A few points about the "whale oil myth".
Whale oil was at best the 2nd most popular fuel, probably 3rd, and it was 3x-5x as expensive as the most popular (camphene) or the other potential #2 (coal oil). It was the fuel of the wealthy, not the mass.
Whaling was in decline before Titusville from (surprise here) overfishing.
The drilling of Titusville was not a capitalist response to the Civil War, as the war didn't start until 2 years later; Titusville may have been a capitalist desire to compete in the low cost market (against camphene).
The gov't sealed the fate of caphene, by raising the tax on alchohol to $2/gal, roughly 4x the price of camphene before the tax increase - as camphene was not completely alchohol, the tax only forced the price of camphene to (perhaps) double (nobody kept BLS or EIA stats in those days). This just happened to give oil-based (as opposed to coal oil) kerosene a very hefty price advantage.
Whaling didn't recover until the Europeans changed the technology in the 1900s, making it possible to kill profitiably whales that previously were unhunted for cost reasons. Large whales never recovered from our Nantucket adventure.
Please also look at Oil Springs. They celebrated the first commercial oil well in 1858 in North America last year. www.oilsprings.ca
The history of oil didn't start in US. It was Poland where the oil was distilled for the first time by Ignacy Łukasiewicz, who built first oil well in 1853 and first refinery in 1856. I would suggest you this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_%C5%81ukasiewicz to start with your research on beginning of the oil industry.
Russian engineer F.N. Semyenov used a cable tool in 1844 to drill an oil well near the Bibi-Eibat (Bibi-Heybat) embayment on the Apsheron Peninsula, Baku, ten years before Colonel Drake's famous well in Pennsylvania. Also, offshore drilling started up at Baku at Bibi-Eibat near the end of the 19th century, about the same time that the "first" offshore oil well was drilled in 1896 at Summerland field on the California Coast.
I conducted extensive research on man's history with natural gas and petroleum for the first chapter of my book, "Practical Advances in Petroleum Processing" (ISBN 0-387-25811-8). Ignacy Łukasiewicz was indeed a pioneer in the on-purpose production and refining of petroleum. Semyenov's use of a cable tool also was a first. Drake's well can be called the first on-purpose oil well drilled through rock in the United States. Here is a table from my book:
Table 1. History of Petroleum Before 1861
3000 BC Sumerians use asphalt as an adhesive for making mosaics.
Mesopotamians use bitumen to line water canals, seal boats, and build roads. Egyptians use pitch to grease chariot wheels, and asphalt to embalm mummies.
1500 BC The Chinese use petroleum for lamps and for heating homes.
600 BC Confucius writes about the drilling of 100-foot (30-meter) natural gas wells in China. The Chinese build pipelines for oil using bamboo poles.
600-500 BC Arab and Persian chemists mix petroleum with quicklime to make Greek fire, the napalm of its day.
1200-1300 AD The Persians mine seep oil near Baku (now in Azerbaijan).
1500-1600 AD Seep oil from the Carpathian Mountains is used in Polish street lamps. The Chinese dig gas wells more than 2000 feet (600 meters) deep.
1735 AD Oil is extracted from oil sands in Alsace, France.
Early 1800s Oil is produced in United States from brine wells in Pennsylvania.
1847 James Oakes builds a “rock oil” refinery in Jacksdale, England.6 The unit processes 300 gallons per day to make “paraffin oil” for lamps. James Young builds a coal-oil refinery in Whitburn, Scotland.
1848 F.N. Semyenov drills the first "modern" oil well near Baku.
1849 Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner distills kerosene from crude oil.
1854 Ignacy Lukasiewicz drills oil wells up to 150 feet (50 meters) deep at Bóbrka, Poland.
1857 Michael Dietz invents a flat-wick kerosene lamp (Patent issued in 1859). This is important because the driving force behind the Pennsylvania oil rush was to produce kerosene for illumination. Kerosene was cheaper than whale oil and higher in quality than lard oil, etc.
1858 Ignacy Lukasiewicz builds a crude oil distillery in Ulaszowice, Poland. The first oil well in North America is drilled near Petrolia, Ontario, Canada.
1859 Colonel Edwin L. Drake triggers the Pennsylvania oil boom by drilling a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania that was 69-feet deep and produced 35 barrels-per-day.
1859 An oil refinery is built in Baku (now in Azerbaijan).
1860-61 Oil refineries are built near Oil Creek, Pennsylvania; Petrolia, Ontario, Canada; and Union County, Arkansas.
Please have a lock in this article. In 1857 Romania was officially recorded first oil production of the world. Probably the wells were drilled before?????? 1857???? and .....
Hello,
the Wietze oil well in Germany (from 1857 to 1858) was drilled and struck rich before Drake's, , and there were even earlier ones in Romania, and Poland. The US only sees what they want to see.
H
;-P
Greetings and good luck with concocted history,
ks