The History of the Oil Trade
You’ve heard it plenty of times before, the age of relying on oil is ending. Which, of course, calls for development and use of alternative energy schemes. But in the meantime, is there something we can we learn from the rich history of oil?
Imagine that very first time flowing petroleum surged out of the ground from a well. That day was 150 years ago, and it has birthed many of our modern tools and machines, all made with oil’s energy, such as cars, airplanes, oil-driven locomotives, tractors, chemicals, plastic and fertilizer.
But back before the first oil wells were sunk, as early as 1410, the Iroquois extricated oil from the ground and used it medicinally as a salve, purge, mosquito repellent, and tonic. The Indian Medicine men were really the first to find and use oil on the continent, believing that the oil seeps were gifts from Creator. They had no plans to exploit this gift by taking out as much as they possibly could. Leave that to more capitalist-minded cultures, which is exactly what early Americans did, thereby creating a civilization built around this resource.
The first wells were sunk with what they could come up with, such as Edwin Drake’s early idea of using a rope holding a heavy metal tip to break the rock and extract the oil. In what is now Petrolia, in the Oil Creek valley of western Pennsylvania, the wells of Titusville, Pithole, and Oil City pumped 56 million barrels of oil out of the ground from 1859 to 1873. After the civil war, supply outweighed demand, and the barrels were worth more than the oil inside them. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but this huge amount of cheap energy was definitely the co-parent, this time! In a world where automobiles were scarcely dreamed of by the common civilian, all types of new inventions suddenly sprang up from nowhere, inventions that ran on oil, or were made from oil or its components. Before we knew it, we were depending on this seemingly endless “black gold” from inside the earth.
Now, 150 years later, oil’s spotlight is coming to an end. The details may be murky and debated, but no one can deny that oil will play a different role in the next century than it did in the past. Many theories are tossed around as to what exactly will replace our oil-centric machines and products, and how our lives will be shaped in new ways around the new technology. One well-known alternative is electric vehicles. Other alternatives to turn to could be biofuels such as algae, or synthetic fuels made from coal or shale oil.
The world is ripe for brave innovation as reflected in the words of Brian Black, an energy historian at Pennsylvania State University and author of the book Petrolia, “What is required is to operate without fear and to take energy transitions on as a developmental opportunity.”
