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  • Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920 by Brian Frehner
  • Dolly Jørgensen (bio)
Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920. By Brian Frehner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Pp. xiii+232. $50.

In Brian Frehner's Finding Oil, contestations over knowledge of the seen and unseen take center stage. When the search for oil began in the nineteenth century, underground geological structures could not be observed in a direct way. Prospectors knew that Earth's depths held hidden riches, but they needed to make sense of the invisible to know where to drill a well to find oil. Frehner argues that the oil hidden from view "challenged prospectors to encounter nature both physically and intellectually in order to locate, extract, and control the resource they sought" (p. 4). By looking at this challenge to understand nature, Frehner frames his inquiry as both environmental history and history of science.

Frehner's narrative brings to light some of the debates and personalities that shaped how oil was found in the early days of commercial oil production, from 1859 when the first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania to 1920 when seismic technology came into use for oil discovery. Petroleum geology evolved out of struggles for authority between different kinds of knowledge, primarily in opposition to the knowledge of "practical men," eventually becoming a mainstay in the quest for oil.

The book is organized into three parts around knowledge-production regimes. The first part, "Local Knowledge," has two chapters on the search for oil in Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century. Knowledge of a place, based on fieldwork at a particular locale, was vital to the early search for oil. Frehner argues that this knowledge invoked the senses—looking, smelling, and touching. "Practical oil men," a contemporary label for prospectors who used landscape observations to decide where to drill, relied on field experience to strike oil. Geologists followed the same mode of knowledge production, relying on fieldwork during geological surveys and mapmaking to create visual representations of hidden strata.

In the second part, "Contested Knowledge," Frehner moves west with the oil prospectors to examine this interplay of context-specific knowledge generated by practical men and universal principles esteemed by geologists. Early theories about where to find oil (near creek beds and along belt-lines) based on field experience were soon supplemented by geological theories explaining oil's location. We see this in the history of Tom Slick, a practical man with a knack for finding oil. After he discovered the Cushing field in Oklahoma, geologists showed that the drilling success was consistent with the theory of anticlines, which bolstered the reputation of geology. At the same time, universities began geology educational programs that churned out students destined for work in the oil industry. The University of Oklahoma program, which gets the spotlight in this section, incorporated substantial [End Page 202] fieldwork in order to train geologists in reading landscapes. The educational tactic was a blending of practical and theoretical knowledge.

The final part, "Appropriated Knowledge," gives us the story of the integration of petroleum geologists in Empire Gas and Fuel in the 1910s. Empire struggled with finding young geologists with enough practical knowledge to be useful in the field. The company soon discovered that applying geological knowledge did not immediately lead to increased oil production, and many of its early attempts at integrating geologists did not last. It did, however, found the first department in an oil company devoted to subsurface geology.

Frehner relies heavily on biographical sketches of people who shaped the early development of petroleum geology to drive the narrative. While these make the book easy to read, there is a tendency to draw overarching conclusions from the events of one person's life. For example, J. Peter Lesley's experiences at the Pennsylvania Geological Survey in the 1800s are presented as typical battles over geological professional authority and trends toward collaboration, rather than as unique situations caused by Lesley's opinionated personality. It is similarly unclear how influential the University of Oklahoma's geology department really was on the development of petroleum geology education nationwide.

While Frehner examines the intersection of the environment...

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