Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

4. Colonel of an Industry

4 Colonel of an Industry The founders of the United States had no way of knowing it, but their new nation was born with a treasure chest in the basement. Below the rich natural resources that were visible on the surface, the territories that would ultimately be included in these United States were the home to some of the world’s richest deposits of one of the world’s most valuable resources—petroleum . It just took the nation’s founders, and their descendants, some time to figure that out. For thousands of years before the descendants of Europeans came to North America, the native peoples on the continent knew about the presence of petroleum, mainly in the form of seeps that brought underground deposits to the surface. The oil had a number of uses, but perhaps the only one that involved a significant contribution to transportation was when native peoples such as the Chumash, along what is now California’s south-central coast, used the tarry “pitch” from natural seeps to seal and hence to improve the seaworthiness of their canoes. Up through roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, the European settlers and their descendants made even less use of the substance we know today as oil; instead, when they spoke of “oil,” the reference was likely to mean whale oil. Given that the electric light had not yet been invented at the time, they 64 Chapter 4 were most often thinking about using the stuff in whale oil lamps. “Yankee” or American whaling started almost as soon as colonists started to settle in North America, which is to say during the 1600s, but it was not until the 1800s when the United States became a virtual OPEC of the whale oil world. By 1833, there were 392 American whaling vessels. That number almost doubled in the next 13 years, reaching 736 whaling vessels by just about the middle of the century, in 1846. By that time, the industry employed some 70,000 people, and U.S. ships made up 80 percent of the entire world’s whaling fleet. Herman Melville , soon to be famous as the author of Moby Dick, set out on his own whaling adventure from New Bedford, Mass., in 1841, but he had a great deal of company. As noted by the National Park Service, “more whaling voyages sailed from New Bedford”during the 1850s“than from all of the world’s [other] ports combined.” By the middle of the 19th century, whaling produced roughly 4 to 5 million gallons of sperm oil, plus at least a million pounds of bone, each year.1 During the first half of the nineteenth century, very few of the whaling captains would have had reasons to imagine that they would be facing any significant competition from “rock oil,”which, perhaps prophetically, was also often called“American oil.”Even when the descendants of the early European colonists began to develop uses for that rock oil in the mid-1800s, the emphasis was on its supposed medicinal value. Drawing small quantities of oil from natural seeps, a growing band of businessmen began to tout the product as the cure for almost any illnesses that could be imagined. One of the more imaginative entrepreneurs was a fellow named Samuel Kier, based in Pittsburgh, who was bottling, selling, and extolling the spectacular medical virtues of his product by the late 1840s. He sold almost a quarter of a million bottles of his oil within the Colonel of an Industry 65 next decade, at the price of a dollar per bottle, but the actual curative properties of the contents fell a bit short of the sales pitches. Given that this oil was named after the Seneca Indians, who had inhabited the region of Pennsylvania where much of the oil was gathered, perhaps longest-term contribution from Kiel and his colleagues was linguistic: Their product—Seneca Oil—is remembered today under the slightly altered pronunciation of “snake oil.”2 Other entrepreneurs, however, were soon to develop other uses for rock oil, thanks in part to forms of inventiveness that, rather than celebrating the oil’s claimed medicinal miracles, in its original form, actively worked to change the physical properties of the oil. In 1849, a Canadian named Abraham Gesner developed and soon patented a process for distilling the rock oil to produce keroselain—a word derived from combining the Greek words for...