by Sonia Shah
When set alight, oil’s long chains of carbon split apart, releasing the energy stored in their powerful bonds. Afterwards, oil’s hydrogens and carbons pair off with the oxygen in the air, forming carbon dioxide and water.7 The amount of energy stored in a gallon of oil is equal to the amount in almost five kilograms of the best coal, or more than ten kilograms of wood or more than fifty well-fed human slaves toiling the day away.8 Oil contained so much energy that it could be used with abandon and still release much more energy than was required to get it out of the ground.
The men in Pennsylvania had a better idea than time-consuming hand-digging for this miraculous new liquid. They would drill an oil well, just as they had drilled wells for water and salt. First they’d find the oil seeps in creeks and hills and then they’d stab the earth nearby to get more out. In the famous story, in 1859 Edwin L. Drake, a former railroad conductor, drilled a hole on a farm where seeping oil was collected; at sixty-nine feet, the hole started, incredibly, to fill with dark fluid.
Explorers of all ilks criss-crossed the globe, hunting for the tell-tale leaks that might produce riches when tapped. On the other side of the ocean, Russians drilled the seeps whose eternal fires had so entranced the Persians. They shipped the oil from Baku in tankers—the first was called the Zoroaster—across the Caspian Sea. Around Baku, the smoke from the two hundred refineries that distilled the oil was so dense that the area was known as “Black Town.” Russia’s dirty oil started filling lamps across Asia, along with oil extracted from dripping rocks in Indonesia by Royal Dutch Shell. Entrepreneurs with dollar signs dancing in their eyes braved the hostile lands and people of Persia to drill along oil seeps there.9
By 1862, drilling near known oil seeps in Pennsylvania was bringing up 3 million barrels annually. They called it oil “production,” a funny term given that they weren’t “producing” anything, but taking something the earth had made countless years before humans had evolved. It took just thirty years for sixteen thousand farmers, entrepreneurs, and speculators to drain Pennsylvania’s oil, by piercing the earth in as many places as they could and siphoning the oil out as fast as was then technically possible. When the oil wells abruptly ran dry, it was like a plague had fallen upon the nearby towns that had mushroomed around the wells. Having no idea how much oil there was underground or where it came from, they hadn’t seen the end coming.
Unlike coal, which could essentially be thrown into a fire pit as soon as it came out of the ground, crude oil required energy-intensive processing in order to be truly useful. The oil that bubbled out of the ground was a messy mix of thousands of different kinds of hydrocarbons, the mushed remains of the cell walls of ancient algae, in various states of pressurized decay. There’d be some long chains of carbon, with seventy or more carbons linked together, as well as light gas, tiny little hydrocarbons with just four carbons linked together, and everything in between besides. The mix would vary from crude to crude, depending, in part, on how deeply buried the oil had been.
The different hydrocarbons in crude oil all burned at different temperatures, which was a problem when trying to harness the energy of their explosive combustion. The various fractions would have to be distilled into their various pure components, so that machines could be tailormade to specific types of hydrocarbons. To do it, refiners would essentially boil the crude.
As the crude gets hotter, different fractions reach their varying boiling points and turn into gas. At room temperature, the methane immediately evaporates. At more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the 8-carbon-chains—octane or gasoline—turn to gas and drift off. At around 500 degrees, the 16-carbon-chains, the diesel, evaporate. At over 1,000 degrees, even the tarry 80-carbon-chains, the coke, start to stew. In modern refineries, each constituent is lovingly captured, as its vapors rise in giant steel towers, cooling as they float higher and higher.10
But in the nineteenth century, there was only one fraction that was deemed useful. That fraction was kerosene, which was used to illuminate the nineteenth-century night, marking a considerable improvement over scarce sperm whale oil and the flammable turpentine people poured into their smoky lamps.11 American refiners distilled as much kerosene as they could; like Pliny, they considered gasoline worse than useless because it was so volatile.12
John D. Rockefeller, a stern, pious entrepreneur from New York, built his fortune on the market for kerosene. Rockefeller considered his task in almost spiritual terms, delivering light to a world of darkness. “Give the poor man his cheap light, gentlemen,” he told his colleagues.13 But in reality it was big business, and hugely lucrative. Rockefeller made it so with his merciless quest to expand his oil empire and dominate markets. He deployed secret front companies to underprice competitors, forcing them out of business. He controlled the means of transporting the precious fluid, extracting deep discounts from the railroads for train transport of his oil. The company countered the inevitable public outcry with clever deceits. “We should . . . parry every question with answers which while perfectly truthful are evasive of bottom facts,” proclaimed one executive.14
Then, in the early hours of October 21, 1879, a sleepless Thomas Edison watched blearily as an electric current zapped through a glass globe in his New Jersey laboratory. Emitting a dim reddish glow, the world’s first incandescent light bulb had been invented, and the electric power industry crackled to life.15
Society’s desire for kerosene rapidly dissipated in the face of the new light. Yet Rockefeller and the other oil barons were swimming in oil. With the Pennsylvania fields wasted, the nascent American oil industry had moved on to Ohio and Indiana in the mid-1880s, where oil had also been dribbling out of the ground. A new market had to be found, and fast.16
The railroads forged in the heat of the Industrial Revolution, ferrying coal, steel, and people, coupled with horse-drawn carriages, defined transportation in the nineteenth century. Both required sizable inputs of energy to power their motion. Rail transport required tons of steel and sweat to build the trains and the rails, and then coal and humans to power and maneuver them along the tracks. Animal-powered carriages required less energy input, just room and board for the creatures and materials to build the carriages, but were likewise less powerful and more limited in terms of range and utility. The ratio of the amount of energy put into the system versus the amount of energy released was, in other words, stubbornly constant.
In 1860, a small contraption that could radically increase the ratio of energy input to output had been invented: the bicycle. This compact simple machine could make human motion almost four times more powerful, catapulting an hour’s exertion from a three-mile slog into a twelve-mile sojourn. It required little maintenance and its humble materials could repay their energy investment handily. Unlike the train, which relied on mountains of coal, and the carriages, exploiting animal metabolism, the bicycle was small-scale, human-powered, and efficient. (This is true even by today’s standards. Modern trains require 210 kilocalories of energy to move a single person a mile forward. A bicycle can do it with just 20 kilocalories, the amount of fuel in a bite of banana.)17
The bicycle had quickly taken the world by storm. “Thousands of riders acquired a taste for speedy mechanical road transport,” wrote car historians Jean-Pierre Bardou and Jean-Jacques Chanaron. It was a completely new way to move, because unlike the trains, which only traveled at certain times, and to and from certain places, bicycles could take their riders virtually anywhere and were “entirely under their own control.”18
Perhaps it was inevitable, with trains steaming about and bicyclists sweating over their handlebars, that the two forms of transport would eventually merge. In 1886, four years after the invention of the light bulb had pulled the kerosene market out from under the wobbling oil barons, German engineer Karl Benz attached a motor to a tricycle. Inspired, two American bicycle mechanics designed their own motorized vehicle in 1893, a gasoline-burning automobile.
The new inventions didn’t exactly overwhelm train-horse-and-
bike society. Three years later, the bike mechanics hadn’t sold even a dozen of the autos.19 The New York Times was not impressed. In the January 3, 1899, edition, they wrote:There is something uncanny about these newfangled vehicles. They are unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good or even an endurable name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology, if in nothing else, have evolved “automobile,” which being half Greek and half Latin is so near indecent that we print it with hesitation.20
Besides being ugly and indecent, cars weren’t very efficient at transporting people. Even today’s cars require three times more energy than trains and thirty times more energy than bicycles to transport people a given distance.
But cars could be fast, and what’s more, unlike the coal-powered trains, cars needed oil to speed along. Coal might compete with oil on some applications (after all, coal was much more abundant) but for this one, oil definitively trumped coal.21 Coal was bulky and its energy was given off too slowly for machines that would need to be turned on and off quickly.
By 1900, Americans had built four thousand of the new gasoline vehicles, holding automobile races and other events to entice the public.22 The fluid needed to propel the new machines continued to turn up in new and unsuspected regions. In 1901, an amazed public learned that essentially by chance, the premonition of a one-armed mechanic, oil had been struck under a salt dome in Texas, gushing out of the ground under its own pressure in a column twice as high as the derrick. Geologists and explorers renewed their hunt, this time looking for salt domes over which to position their drill-bits.23
With oil flowing so profusely, it wasn’t long before American car production surpassed Europe’s—the birthplace of the bicycle and the motorized trike—churning out forty-four thousand cars in 1907.24 In 1909, automaker Henry Ford announced he would “build a motor car for the great multitude,”25 and it was only a year later, with Ford’s affordable Model T’s zipping off the assembly lines, that gasoline sales surpassed those of kerosene.
These new vehicles would go on to conquer the pedestrian, the bicyclist, and the railways themselves, paving over their rights-of-way with smooth asphalt for their immense engines, creating a thirsty new market for the oil industry in the process. Bicycle paths, like those linking Pasadena to Los Angeles, were abandoned half-built, as investors fled from the two-wheeled future they had earlier envisioned.26
The oil empire that Rockefeller founded, based on secrecy, consolidation, and market dominance, had found its raison d’etre. Although Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly was beheaded in 1909, fed on a fatty diet of gasoline sales, Standard’s subsidiaries would slowly regenerate into the gigantic uber-companies from which they sprang.27
Britain had taken the plunge and converted its warships from coal to oil in 1912, even though the country itself had coal reserves but no known sources for oil.28 It was like switching to an all-fruit diet while sailing the Arctic seas; they knew they’d have to take the stuff from someone else’s country, and they already knew where: Iran. The British government had bought into a new British company, Anglo-Persian Oil, today known as the more familiar BP. The company had struck oil in Iran and the crown took it upon itself to protect BP’s access to Persia’s abundant hydrocarbons.29
Across the Atlantic, motorized warfare was off to an inauspicious start. In 1916, General John Pershing enlisted two thousand of the newfangled vehicles to travel two hundred miles into Mexico to hunt down revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. But so undeveloped were the roads and untested were the new machines that “at the end of the campaign,” writes highway historian Lee Mertz, “all two thousand vehicles lay strewn along the line of march in various states of breakdown.”30
The following year’s military exploits proved no better for the reputation of the automobile. The Americans were preparing to send 2 million soldiers, with their horses and fodder, across the ocean to join in the First World War. But how to get them there? All of those men and animals, spread out over the continent, would have to be amassed on the U.S. east coast in order to board ships across the Atlantic to Europe. That appeared impossible. Desperate, the military decided to try trucks again, despite the troubles during the campaign against Pancho Villa.
The nascent auto industry produced thousands of trucks to carry the soldiers and their equipment to ports on the east coast. Once again, the decrepit roads stymied the effort. Where they existed, the roads were impassable. The dirt paths were swamped in mud and obscured by piles of snow. The new trucks, those pinnacles of oil-industry and car-making technology, couldn’t get through. The trucks ended up being loaded onto trains, which carried them to the next section of passable road, while crews worked around the clock to clear snowdrifts.31
Still, the Allied forces didn’t lose faith in the internal combustion engine and its magic fuel, a faith that turned out to be worth the trouble. Britain and the United States unleashed the fury of their agile, petroleum-burning machines—about 163,000 oil-burning vehicles and 70,000 airplanes—vanquishing Germany’s bulky coal-fired ones. Black gold was crowned king. Ten days after Germany surrendered, in November 1918, British statesman Lord George Nathaniel Curzon declared the Allied forces’ triumph as petroleum’s. “The Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil,” he said.32
Back at home, demand for light clear gasoline continued to grow. In 1930, essentially by luck, oil explorers discovered the bountiful oilfields of East Texas. Texan oil flowed from a geological formation, at the time unexpected to hold crude: an “angular unconformity.” As jubilant oil hunters fanned out searching for more, General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone banded together to take over the nation’s streetcar companies. Between the world wars, only about one in ten Americans owned a car, as most urban residents traveled by electric streetcar, which whisked commuters along their steel tracks leaving just the bumpy margins of the roads for automobiles.33 As Texas’s oil spilled forth, the companies boldly attempted to force consumers to opt for gasoline-burning cars instead, curtailing electric trolley services and replacing them with unpopular diesel-burning buses.34
Meanwhile, chemists were beginning to unlock the mysteries of a small but popular set of natural and semisynthetic materials called “plastics,” from the Greek word “plastikos,” meaning “able to be molded.”35 These elastic substances derived from all kinds of unlikely sources—amber, horn, wax, bitumen, shellac (from the secretion of the lac beetle), and gutta percha—and their unusual properties made them uniquely useful. Gutta percha, a dark-brown material from the Malaysian palaquium tree, was used for sheathing the first submarine telegraph cable. Shiny hard buttons could be made from casein, a paste of milk curds mixed with formaldehyde. Flexible but firm tires could be made from rubber trees, grown in plantations in Southeast Asia, and mixed with sulfur to form “vulcanized rubber.” Celluloid, cellulose from cotton mixed with vegetable oil into a dough that could be molded into shapes or pressed into thin sheets, was used to capture early photographs and to form into billiard balls, replacing earlier ones made of elephant tusk ivory.36
At first, chemists thought these jelly-like compounds were actually a multitude of small molecules somehow held together. But then the truth came out: these elastic materials consisted of single molecules of unheard-of lengths. Some could have hundreds of thousands of atoms strung together in long flexible chains.37
With this insight, chemists set about building similar molecules, cracking, reforming, linking, and de-linking carbon chains, much as refiners did. The best compounds they came up with indeed were extremely malleable. Some could even be melted, molded, hardened into shape, and then melted and molded again. They could be stretched out in thin sheer sheets, cut into slivery threads and woven into fabrics, or shaped into poles and platforms to build furniture. The new synthetic plastics didn’t have to be made out of oil—coal, alcohol, or natural gas could all be changed into the necessary building blocks—but with the gush of byproducts from refineries, oil was
the cheapest and easiest option.38
In 1940, Popular Mechanics magazine predicted that “the American of tomorrow” would be “clothed in plastics from head to foot . . . will live in a plastics house, drive a plastics auto and fly in a plastics airplane.” 39 The Second World War would help make it so.
By 1941, Japan had taken control of the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia, cutting off the supply of natural rubber to the United States. For American soldiers and pilots fighting in Europe, this meant that a flat tire had become a death sentence. The U.S. government pumped over $3 billion into the fledgling petrochemicals industry, demanding a ramped-up supply of synthetic rubber, along with whatever other goodies the industry could devise. With a river of byproducts streaming out of the oil refineries—themselves working in overdrive to provide fuels for the war effort—the petrochemists outfitted soldiers not just with synthetic rubber tires, but with nylon parachutes, synthetic rubber life rafts, plexiglas airplane windows, and plastic raincoats. Other crude byproducts, such as naphtha and methane, were blasted into nitrogen ammonia for explosives.40
Out on the battlefield, oil’s essential role in powering the machines of war was undisputed. Military leaders took aim at the veins and capillaries of the enemy’s oil supply. Allied submarines targeted Japanese oil tankers, crippling the oil lifeline to that oil-poor country. Allied torpedoes sent over 2 million tons worth of Japanese warships and oil tankers to the bottom of the South Pacific. The sunken oil might threaten delicate coral reefs and fishing grounds many decades later, but it wouldn’t power the Japanese war machine.41 “Toward the end,” commented one Japanese captain, “we were fairly certain a tanker would be sunk shortly after departing from port.” By the first quarter of 1945, not a single drop of imported oil reached Japanese shores, and the Japanese started building their naval ships to burn labor-intensive coal instead.42
