The End of Country (7 page)

T
HIS IS THE WAY
the whole history of the hunt for gas and oil plays out, with stories just like this: the ground shudders, a fracture appears, and a character furiously forces his way up through it. He burns brightly for a time, then vanishes like a wisp of gas. Hart was the first. Col. Edwin Drake was the next.

Within a few years of Hart’s discovery, another breed of pioneers
had emerged in Fredonia, and they were working to smooth out the rough edges that Hart had left behind. The business of America has always been business, and by 1858, a group of local merchants and entrepreneurs had figured out a rudimentary way to meter the gas, devised a formula to set a price for it—they charged customers four dollars per thousand cubic feet of the stuff—and formed the nation’s first natural gas firm, the Fredonia Gas Light Company.

Soon the land around Fredonia, and other towns and villages in the region where similar deposits of gas were located, was crisscrossed with lead pipelines far more elaborate than the hollowed-out logs that Hart had used, and the fuel was being funneled to the richer markets in places such as Erie and Buffalo.

Even then, Fredonia’s flirtation with natural gas was already being eclipsed. Because of the limitations of pipeline technology at the time, it was difficult to transport the gas reliably from places like Fredonia to the nation’s major markets, places like New York City and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Coal, which had been moving inexorably toward domination of the U.S. energy market ever since it was first commercially mined in America in the 1730s, was far easier to deliver. Not only could coal be burned in its rock form, it was also comparatively easy to leach a cheap (if not entirely efficient) gas out of it that could be used to fuel streetlamps and cooking rings.

Not only that, but another local competitor to natural gas was also simultaneously emerging, and it, too, was literally oozing up from the ground near the shores of Lake Erie. The same year that the Fredonia Gas Light Company flickered to life, Hart’s successor, Col. Edwin Drake, was taking the first tentative steps toward the world’s domination by oil. As with so many other aspects of America’s long energy history, it was only through a series of improbable events and the precise alignment of the stars that Drake was able to make the discovery that would catapult him into the history books.

Born in 1819, Drake had grown up on a series of farms in eastern New York state and Vermont. After leaving home at nineteen, Drake became a bit of a vagabond, wandering the country, taking whatever work he could find. Eventually he made his way to Connecticut, where he took a job, first as a baggage handler and later as a conductor, on the New York and New Haven Railroad. It wasn’t much of a job, but it did provide enough of an income that Drake was able to
start a family, and he soon married a young woman named Philena Adams. The job also had another perk—he could travel for free wherever the railroad went and whenever he wished.

In 1854, when Drake was thirty-five, Philena Adams Drake died while giving birth to their second child, and a few years later, when Drake himself fell ill, he retired from the railroad. As a parting gift, he was allowed to keep his privilege of unlimited rail travel.

That would eventually come in very handy. By 1857, Drake was nearing forty, well into what was then considered middle age. He had remarried, to a woman sixteen years his junior, but his financial prospects were dim. Perhaps in an effort to clear his head, he took to the rails, and as luck would have it, he ended up stepping off a train in Pittsburgh. He took a room in a cheap hotel not far from the train station, a place that also happened to be sheltering George H. Bissell and Jonathan G. Eveleth, a pair of hungry entrepreneurs, and that same night, these fellow travelers told Drake how they had only recently founded a company called Seneca Oil in order to market a new fuel called kerosene, a cheaper and less volatile alternative to the principal lubricant and illuminant of the day, the ever more costly whale oil.

They explained that near a small town called Titusville, in a remote stretch of Pennsylvania woods, there was said to be a large amount of “rock oil”—the raw material for kerosene—bubbling out of the ground. For at least a thousand years, Native Americans had collected this slimy, honey-colored substance to heat their long-houses, but the locals were oblivious to the potential of the resource they were sitting on. In fact, in the years since the Indians had been driven off, rock oil had lost favor as a fuel, though the hardy Europeans who replaced them had found another use for the stuff: they bottled and sold it as an elixir, good for whatever ailed you.

Bissell and Eveleth were convinced that kerosene was the fuel of the future, however, and they were sure that they could make a killing if only they could find the right man to go to Titusville and develop it on their behalf. The right man didn’t even have to have a background in science or engineering. The truth is, Bissell and Eveleth could not afford to pay for that kind of expertise. The only qualification they required was the one thing Drake brought to the table: a free train ticket to the woods of northwestern Pennsylvania.

Thus, in almost no time, Drake was the proud owner of a stake in the fledgling oil company and a brand-new title—one of the firm’s investors had, for reasons known only to that investor, taken to calling Drake “Colonel,” and even though he had never served a day in the military, the title stuck. He was on his way to Titusville.

In 1858, not long after he arrived in Titusville, Drake became the first to do what oilmen have done ever since. Using a derrick modified from the ancient Chinese cable tool technology and powered by a source that Drake knew a little something about—a steam locomotive engine he managed to persuade the investors to spring for—Drake drilled. And he drilled. And he drilled. And he failed. And he failed. And he failed. No matter how hard or fast the drill bit turned, the earth and rock and water that lay just beneath the surface closed back in around the borehole, slowing the drill, stalling it. It was as if the earth itself was trying to choke the world’s first oil well to death in its crib. His backers in Pittsburgh began to lose patience. But the sickly, dour former railroad man had one more idea that would become his greatest contribution to the world’s energy future, one that is still in use today: he painstakingly followed the drill bit, lining the hole with iron casings, holding back the earth, the stone, and the water, until his drill reached the targeted deposit of oil. He bored through the casing to a depth of 70 feet.

Oil did not rush up out of the ground. In fact, nothing happened. Shattered, Drake walked away. He came back the next morning—it was August 27, 1859—to find oil bubbling up into the well.

Given the primitive surveying techniques of the time, and the rudimentary understanding of geology, it was pure luck that Drake hit any oil at all. As author Virginia Thorndike noted in her 2007 book
LNG
, had Drake drilled a few yards away in any direction, he would have missed the deposit altogether. But, as Thorndike put it, and as every one of these stories can attest, “Luck is a large part of the story of oil and gas exploration.”

That first oil well produced a meager twenty-five barrels a day, but it was enough to begin the long process of ushering in the age of oil. It is perhaps another of those odd twists in the history of the American petroleum industry—an industry that through hubris or greed or human error has caused so much environmental mayhem—that the industry actually began with an environmental benefit. It can be
argued in good faith that Drake’s discovery helped slow the steady extermination of the world’s dwindling whale population by making whale oil obsolete. It also permanently relegated natural gas to second-class status as a fuel.

Unlike natural gas, oil could be easily stored and easily transported in barrels—back then, whiskey barrels were used for the purpose—and not only could it be burned as a fuel, it could, like whale oil, be used as a lubricant. It was a watershed discovery. In barns and carriage houses all across America, enterprising inventors began tinkering with new kinds of machines that could be run on this cheap, plentiful commodity, and John D. Rockefeller and his band of oil barons made sure they’d have plenty of the stuff available, firing a process that would reach its apex forty years after Drake’s well began operations when Henry Ford rolled his Quadricycle out onto the streets of Detroit. Soon, the remote backwater of Titusville turned into a boom-town, far more chaotic and fast-paced a place than Fredonia had ever been, and in the entire region, vast tracts of old-growth forest were felled so that the timbers could be used to build derricks to rush even more oil out of the ground. Great fortunes were about to be made—for everyone, it seems, except the crazy old make-believe colonel who had started it all.

Indeed, luck followed the industry and not its inventor. Drake had never bothered to patent his derrick or protect his techniques, and, ever the gambler, he lost what savings he had as a result of speculation in the wild markets of the 1860s. By the time he died in 1880, he was a penniless old man, living hand to mouth in the eastern Pennsylvania steel town of Bethlehem, far from the oil fields he had opened, with nothing but a $1,500-a-year pension that the state legislature had granted to him as a kind of thank-you for making so many other people rich.

P
ROSPERITY IS FICKLE, AND
, though Drake’s discovery in the scree of western Pennsylvania would change the world, the riches that Drake helped bring to Titusville, and from there throughout northern Appalachia, would not last forever. By the time my parents bought their piece of northern Appalachia, the boom was long over, and only the faintest echo of it remained.

It had started with a bang, that’s certain. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, refineries had sprouted along the banks of the Allegheny River, and in formerly sleepy river towns like Port Allegany at the headwater of the river 180 miles or so northeast of Pittsburgh, great mansions sprang up on wide, elm-lined boulevards to house the wealthy oil barons. But by the early 1920s, the great Appalachian energy boom was already starting to fade, a victim, in part, of technology. The old oil and gas fields of Appalachia were giving out the last of their easily gotten resources, and the cable drilling technology that had opened those fields in the first place was now old hat. It had been replaced by rotary drilling, in which a massive drill, less brutal but no less effective than its predecessor, whirls its way into the earth under enormous power.

Like most new technologies, rotary drilling was based on a very old idea. It was a concept that had its roots in ancient Egypt and got a facelift from Leonardo da Vinci in the late fifteenth century, but only really took off in the early part of the twentieth century. In much the same way that advances in technology in the last decade would open up vast new territories—including the Marcellus Shale—the rotary technology in the early twentieth century was opening up new fields for exploration all over the nation.

The real death blow to Appalachian energy was actually delivered in 1901 and half a continent away from Titusville when, after several failed attempts, a wildcatter named Anthony F. Lucas—Captain Anthony F. Lucas, as he called himself—decided to take one last stab at sinking a well into the Spindletop salt dome outside Beaumont, Texas.

At first, nothing happened, and then, in the winter of 1900–01, just as the investors seemed ready to pull the plug, Lucas made one last attempt. On January 10, 1901, using what was then state-of-the-art rotary-bit technology—essentially a big whirling jackhammer—they set off a 150-foot-high gusher that dwarfed anything ever seen in Appalachia. In so doing they not only launched the modern age of oil but made the sandy southwest its epicenter for the next seventy years, creating with it the classic image of the Texas oilman, an icon that has lasted, as it turns out, far longer than the primacy of Texas oil has.

I
N THE MEANTIME, NATURAL GAS
languished, and so did the Appalachian Basin. With the invention of electric light, gas ceased to be needed for streetlamps, since electricity could be produced more
cheaply using coal as a fuel. Half of America’s electricity continues to be produced using coal. Natural gas was relegated to the background of the American energy picture: a useful fuel for cooking, perhaps for heating a few homes, but not much else. No longer the capital of American energy, the cities of the gas belt—such as Bradford, Pennsylvania, and Port Allegany—began the long, slow slide into rust belt oblivion, a slide that continued throughout the last century when even Quaker State, a company that traded on its Pennsylvania ties, pulled up stakes and headed for the Southwest.

Appalachia wasn’t completely fallow, of course. There were still some very active gas fields, places like the Big Sandy, a sprawling gas field straddling the West Virginia–Kentucky border that has produced a steady enough supply of gas since the 1920s to fill much of the limited desire for it. But such places were the exception and would remain so for generations.

At least three times over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of using natural gas as a primary fuel would resurface. Usually these initiatives took place in times of national crisis, and most often they were part of a campaign by the federal government to reduce oil consumption, or at least supplement it. In the 1930s, for example, as the nation was crawling out from under the Great Depression and gearing up for the war to come, the Roosevelt administration freed up some WPA cash to send a small army of geologists and engineers into the hinterlands of western New York and northern Pennsylvania to assess the potential stores of gas in the various subterranean layers of rock. The study was repeated four decades later by the Carter administration, after domestic U.S. oil production had already begun its rapid decline and after the oil shocks of the 1970s showed for the first time how vulnerable the nation had become to foreign markets. It was then that the geologists first turned up on Ellsworth Hill. But when each of those immediate challenges passed, so, too, did the interest in studying the gas, and the findings were relegated to the back shelves of libraries at a few universities. For the most part, and for most of the twentieth century, gas locked in the various Appalachian shales was considered either a nuisance or at best a sideshow to the real energy game. It was too hard to harness, and even if you could, the price it would fetch on the market wasn’t worth the effort.