Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ this case because of the bobcats and mountain lions that roared around prospectors at night in the dense Pennsylvania woods. It stuck as shorthand for any exploratory well in previously untapped terrain as prospectors expanded their efforts into West Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Public demand for the new lantern fuel soared—not just in the United States but throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia. One man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over those ballooning markets. His mission, as author Daniel Yergin described it, was to deliver “the gift of ‘new light’ to the world of darkness”—a gift that, for the moment, was supplied exclusively by oil wells in the American Northeast.

      But the oil game changed radically in 1901. For years, leading geologists had insisted that no petroleum could be found at Spindletop. Two rogue wildcatters disagreed—Anthony Lucas, a salt miner from Louisiana, and Pattillo Higgins, a local mechanic and amateur geologist. Higgins was the willful son of a gunsmith; at the age of seventeen he lost his left arm in a shootout with a sheriff. A self-starter, Higgins tried running logging and brickmaking businesses before he taught himself petroleum geology from secondhand textbooks and fell in love with oil. Lucas was a Croatian immigrant with a degree in mechanical engineering. Handsome and stout, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes, he mined gold and salt in Colorado and Louisiana, where he developed a theory that salt deposits could be indicators of big oil fields lying deep below.

      As early as the eighteenth century, scientists had theorized that petroleum and other fossil fuels (including coal and natural gas) originated, as Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov wrote in the mid-1700s, from “tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform.” These “tiny bodies” were predominantly of marine plankton: both Lucas and Higgins were ahead of the curve in connecting salt deposits with the contours of former seas and the precious buried residue of marine life.

      The idea to drill at Spindletop first came to Higgins when he took his Baptist Sunday school class on a picnic to Spindletop Hill—a bleak plateau thick with rock salt on the edge of the sleepy rice mill town of Beaumont. It was a strange spot for lunch: pools of foul-smelling water and sulfurous gases oozed from the land, and wild bulls were known to wander the hills. But Higgins knew the place from his geology studies and had a trick up his sleeve: he jabbed his cane into the ground, and as the sulfurous vapor escaped he struck a match, creating an instantaneous bloom of fire that dazzled the kids.

      Convinced that oil lay beneath the gas seep, Higgins subsequently tried to sink the first exploratory well himself in 1896 but quickly ran out of funds. He ran an ad in the local newspaper seeking investors, and Lucas answered, curious about the location’s rock salt terrain. The men formed a partnership and over the following year drilled multiple test wells with no luck, again draining their coffers. Higgins bowed out but Lucas persisted, obtaining funds from Pennsylvania-based oil investors and contributing his own limited savings—at one point even selling all his furniture to keep the project alive.

      Lucas commissioned the Hamill brothers, jovial do-it-yourself engineers from Corsicana, Texas, to construct a more powerful drill. Following his guidelines, they jury-rigged the Spindletop derrick from hand-cut lumber and powered it with a boiler fed by firewood. Lucas kept the drilling operation going for nearly a year, grinding down into the earth with this primitive drill 500 feet, then 700, then 1,300. Suddenly he struck the payload.

      At 10:30 a.m. on January 10, 1901, the dry earth began to shudder. Mud gurgled up to the mouth of the well, giving way to a thunderous blast of gas that launched hundreds of feet of thick steel pipe and hunks of bedrock into the air. Rocks the size of cannonballs rained down. The oil bed had been penetrated, and pressure from its rocks and surrounding gases had triggered the explosion. The debris was followed by oil—shooting up over the top of the derrick in a stream 150 feet high. As a crowd gathered to watch, the geyser coated the onlookers with a mist of inky, pungent liquid the consistency of corn syrup: black gold.

      The following day, the Dallas Morning News reported that the “people of Beaumont, of every sort and condition, are in a feverish state of excitement…The throng on the streets appears to be childishly happy and grown men are going about smiling and bowing to each other like school girls.” The news quickly spread to the national media. “There is wild excitement throughout Southeast Texas over the oil strike,” the New York Times proclaimed on the front page of its January 13, 1901, edition. “The well has a flow of over 18,000 barrels every twenty-four hours. It is said to be the greatest oil strike in the history of that industry.”

      The pressure within the field’s oil-bearing rocks was so intense that the well could not be capped for days, and no tools could be found to quell the current. By January 14, a headline in the Dallas Morning News read, “Want It Stopped: Reward Offered to Any One Who Will Control the Flow.” Reporters estimated that more than 60,000 barrels of oil had gone to waste, despite the fact that every vehicle in town had been mobilized to ferry buckets of crude to holding tanks. Fear spread that the petroleum-drenched soil would catch fire.

      After many sleepless nights, the Hamill brothers—the same engineers whom Lucas had originally hired to drill the well—managed to clamp an iron T-joint and pressure valve to the top of the derrick. The “weary and oil-saturated Hamills still had enough strength and sense of humor left to line up and bow to their audience,” wrote Beaumont historian and oil prospector Michel Halbouty.

      Halbouty was himself a prime example of the swashbuckling breed of wildcatter that came to be uniquely associated with Texas. A lifelong oil entrepreneur who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-five, Halbouty told me at a 2003 energy conference that the day of Spindletop’s discovery “was the day the United States became a world power.” At the time, I looked sideways at Halbouty’s claim—he was a Beaumont native, after all, and struck me as someone who might exaggerate the impact of his hometown. An exuberant man with snow-white hair and a silver handlebar mustache, Halbouty was the son of a grocer who began his oil career as a boy carting ice water to workers at Spindletop. He went on to discover dozens of oil and gas fields from Texas to Alaska, building a fortune of millions—one of thousands of Americans whose lives were changed by the Beaumont gusher.

      Soon after Spindletop was uncorked, investors, wildcatters, and thrill seekers rushed to the Texas fields from places as far away as California, Illinois, and New York. Within months, Beaumont’s population had leapt from 9,000 to 50,000, and land prices had surged by a factor of thousands. The town itself had become a forest of wooden derricks shaped like church steeples; iron drill pumps continually lifted and bowed their heads like religious supplicants. The first well drilled (known as the Lucas well) could alone produce half the total U.S. output at the time—as much oil as 37,000 eastern wells, and twice the production of Pennsylvania, the leading oil state.

      The discovery had global implications. “Within a year,” wrote one awed geologist, “Texas oil was burning in Germany, England, Cuba, Mexico, New York and Philadelphia.” By January 1902, 440 gushers had been tapped in the area.

      OIL AND TROUBLE

      “The frenzy has penetrated every mind and the blood has coursed like fire through the hearts of everyone who owned a bit of [Beaumont] land,” reported the Dallas Morning News on January 17, 1901. “The mind has been stunned with the possibilities of great wealth and men have been carried further from sound business principles than they care to admit.”

      Plenty of men struck gold at Spindletop, but many more lost their shirts. Pattillo Higgins, for one, never saw a dime of profit off the well he had discovered and in which he had invested his fortune and sweat. Even Anthony Lucas abandoned his efforts at Spindletop within two years of tapping the gusher; the investors who had funded his efforts had offered him a mere 12 percent ownership of the oil produced, and quickly bought him out.

      Like all oil boomtowns, Beaumont fell СКАЧАТЬ