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Oil and Gas Development in Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Oil Rush

The Pennsylvania oil rush was a boom in petroleum production which occurred in northwestern Pennsylvania from 1859 to the early 1870s. It was the first oil boom in the United States.

The oil rush began in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in the Oil Creek Valley when Colonel Edwin L. Drake struck "rock oil" there and drilled the Drake Well. Titusville and other towns on the shores of Oil Creek expanded rapidly as oil wells and refineries shot up across the region. Oil quickly became one of the most valuable commodities in the United States and railroads expanded into Western Pennsylvania to ship petroleum to the rest of the country.

By the mid-1870s, the oil industry was well established, and the "rush" to drill wells and control production was over. Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, and was later surpassed by western states such as Texas and California, but some oil industry remains in Pennsylvania.

Pre-Rush History

Pre-Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company

Before petroleum was put to use as a popular fuel, oil was still highly used. In Pennsylvania, the Native American tribes had been using oil found in seeps dating back several centuries. Early European explorers discovered evidence of troughs dug along the side of the creek where Native American tribes had collected oil for use as ointment, insect repellant, skin coloring and in religious ceremonies.[1][2] These oil seeps, which are areas where oil spontaneously escapes the earth in either gas or liquid form, were common across the northern Pennsylvania landscape. As the frontier expanded into Western Pennsylvania during the 18th century, the region came to be known for the oil that flowed beneath its surface, and maps from the time period displayed the label “Petroleum.” But with few known uses for crude oil, the label served primarily to deter farmers who found the black soil inhospitable to their crops.[3] As time passed, alternative uses came into play. Crude oil began to be used as an alternative to whale oil as a lighting source for lamps and inventors and scientists began to test oil for other possible uses, including energy.[1]

Kier's Experiments with Oil

With petroleum seeps popping up across western Pennsylvania, it became difficult for other extractive industries, especially for those digging wells for salt water in order to extract salt. This business was popular in the area at the time but with oil from the seeps spilling into the wells, it became much more difficult. In 1849 Samuel Kier began extracting oil from the saltwater wells on his property. Upon further examination, Kier recognized that the medicinal oil being prescribed to his wife was the same in chemistry to the oil found in his wells.[1] Kier began to sell his oil as a remedy and grew wealthy from its profits. Furthermore other uses for Kier’s oil were explored.[4]

In the 1850s Kier then began to simply drill for the crude oil directly rather than separating it from the salt water in his wells. After extracting the oil from drilling, Kier joined up with John T. Kirkpatrick to build the first refinery. Soon Kier and Kirkpatrick distilled oil that could be used for lighting. For years after, Kier spent much time improving the refining process of the crude oil to produce the cleanest and most efficient lighting oil possible. He called his oil, “carbon oil.” To accompany his refined oil, Kier invented an oil-burning lamp that would burn his oil with very little bad smell or smoke. This could have been profitable to Kier but he never patented his lamp.[4]

The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company

Word spread of Kier’s experiments and soon George Bissell, a lawyer from New York, caught wind of Kier’s success in Western Pennsylvania. In 1854, Bissell commissioned a study from Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman, Jr. to assess the viability of harvesting oil in western Pennsylvania. After Silliman’s results confirmed that the petroleum in the Oil Creek Valley could profitably be distilled into lamp oil, Bissell founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.[2] The company was funded by wealthy businessmen and bankers from New Haven, Connecticut. Among these famous stockholders was banker James Townsend.[5]

In 1857 Bissell and Townsend hired Edwin Drake to travel to Titusville and drill for crude oil. Drake was an unemployed railroad conductor whose sole qualification for this new job seems to have been a free railroad pass that would cover his journey to Titusville.[2] Drake secured some land and reported back that he believed the land was oil rich and the oil industry could be extremely profitable. In 1858, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company became the Seneca Oil Company with Drake as president.[1]

Drake Strikes Oil

Soon Drake began drilling for oil in Titusville, near the shores of Oil Creek, but at first met with little success. He used an old steam engine to drill.[6] Many of his drilling sites only yielded trace amounts of oil and he and his assistant, blacksmith Billy Smith, endured fires, financial setbacks, and the ridicule of the local inhabitants.[7] When the Seneca Oil Company gave up and decided to withdraw its funding, Drake took out a personal line of credit to continue digging. On August 27, 1859, Drake’s well struck oil at 69 feet (21 m) below ground, just before his funds ran out. This discovery marked the beginning of a period of drastic change for the people of Western Pennsylvania.[5] His drilling is considered the "first large-scale commercial extraction of petroleum".[6]

Unfortunately for Drake however, his success would not last. He had not purchased much land in the region and therefore the oil industry exploded around him outside of his control. His first well yielded only modest returns and he was fired by the Seneca Oil Company. He never patented the drilling method he pioneered, and lost his modest earnings from the oil business speculating on Wall Street.[8] He would eventually die a poor pensioner in 1880.[1]

The Rush

Soon the area was flooded with wells drilled by the Seneca Oil Company and others. The oil boom in Pennsylvania paralleled in many ways the gold rush in California ten years earlier. It is reported that in the first year (1859), these oil wells produced 4,500 barrels (720 m3) .[1] Boomtowns such as Titusville, Oil City and Pithole sprang up within years and an early chronicler of the region, Reverend S. J. M. Eaton, observed in 1866 that the Oil Creek Valley was so densely packed it was impossible to distinguish the borders where one town ended and another began.[3] The Titusville population exploded from 250 residents to over 10,000 in little more than five years and in 1866 it incorporated as a city. Ironworks were erected to supply drilling tools and eight oil refineries were built between 1862 and 1868. Pithole expanded from four log-cabin farmhouses to a bustling city with over 50 hotels over the span of five months in 1865.[9]

Annual domestic output of crude swelled from 2,000 barrels (320 m3) in 1859, the year of Drake’s “discovery,” to 4,000,000 barrels (640,000 m3) in 1869 and 10,000,000 barrels (1,600,000 m3) in 1873.[10] The ongoing industrial development of Europe spurred this rapid expansion. European, and especially British, factories began importing large quantities of cheap American oil during the 1860s. By 1866, United States petroleum exports far surpassed petroleum distributed to domestic markets and the value of these exports nearly doubled from $16 million in 1865 to $30 million in 1869. Petroleum jumped from the sixth most valuable U.S. export to the second most valuable during this period. At the peak of the oil boom, Pennsylvania wells were producing one third of the world’s oil.[5]

Transportation

In the first years of the oil rush, high overland shipping costs drove many well owners to float their product down Oil Creek to the Allegheny River as lumber producers did.[3] For decades, logs had been transported using man-made floods, known as pond freshets, created by successively breaking milldams along the length of the river. These freshets could carry up to 800 skiffs filled with crude oil downstream at once. Most skiffs held between 700 and 800 barrels (110 and 130 m3) of oil, but one third of that leaked out of the skiffs before they were even launched and another third was lost by the time the skiffs reached Pittsburgh. Furthermore, only three in five of the flimsy vessels survived the trip down river without being destroyed by collisions with rocks, fallen trees, or other skiffs.

In 1862 the Oil Creek Railroad Company completed a line that connected Titusville to the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad and the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad in Corry, Pennsylvania.[11] The new railroad brought more people into the Oil Creek Valley and provided a safer alternative to the freshets for transporting barrels of crude. The oil was carried from the wells to the railroad in horse-drawn wagons. In 1865 pipelines were laid from the oil fields directly to the rail line, ending horse-drawn transport.[12] The following year, the Farmers Railroad extended the rail line 20 km south from Petroleum Center, Pennsylvania to Oil City. In February 1871, the Union City & Titusville Railroad (UC&T), which was built to compete with the Oil Creek Railroad, was completed. The UC&T became part of the larger Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in July 1871.

Consolidation and end of the boom

The rush to Pennsylvania created violent swings in the petroleum market for the first decade of the oil boom. In 1861, the proliferation of wells across the Oil Creek Valley pushed the price of oil down to 10 cents a barrel. In response, producers in the region formed the Oil Creek Association to restrict output and maintain a minimum price of $4 a barrel.[13] Despite efforts such as this to c ed into the early 1870s. By 1871, refining capacity had grown to over 12 million barrels per year, more than twice the amount of oil that was actually processed in that year. The first oil exchange in the United States was established in Titusville in January 1872 in response to rumors that a conspiratorial ring of crude oil traders in New York City had cornered the market.[14] But as the decade progressed, larger producers, such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, began to consolidate their holdings over the wellsTemplate:Cn and refineries in the region, and the oil rush began to settle down.

Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, when the state produced 31 million barrels of oil, 58 percent of the nation's oil that year. But 1892 was the last year that Pennsylvania wells provided a majority of the oil produced in the United States, and in 1895, Ohio surpassed Pennsylvania as an oil producer. By 1907, the decline of the Pennsylvania fields and the great discoveries made in Texas, California, and Oklahoma, left Pennsylvania with less than ten percent of the nation's oil production.[15]

By 1901, the Pennsylvania oil boom was over. The formation of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882 effectively established a monopoly over the industry in Pennsylvania, and the discovery of oil in Texas, California and Wyoming shifted the nation’s attention elsewhere.[5][10] Pennsylvania continued to be a significant producer of petroleum for much of the 20th century, but the Oil Creek Valley had been permanently eclipsed.

Oil and Gas Development in the 20th Century

The Washington Oil Field

The Washington oil field is an oil field and in Washington County, Pennsylvania.[16] It also produced natural gas.

The oil field fueled a boom in Washington County, Pennsylvania from the 1880s to the early 1900s. For a time, the McGugin Gas Well was the largest flow of natural gas in the world and provided Pittsburgh with most of its natural gas needs.

Geological components

The Gantz Sand, named after Washington's Gantz Oil Well, is located in the upper Devonian/lower Mississippian strata.[17][18] Its clean pebbly sandstone stretches from Washington County into north central West Virginia and produces oil and gas at depths greater than 1,700 feet (520 m).[17] The Gantz sand is frequently misidentified.[19]

Early extraction efforts

The Washington oil field was first tapped by Washington County Eureka Oil Company in 1861.[20] The well, which was drilled to a depth of 900 feet (270 m), was located at the Mannon farm, located at the West Amity station along the Waynesburg and Washington Railroad.[20] Other short-lived exploratory efforts were subsequently undertaken at Prosperity, Lone Pine, and South Strabane Township.[20]

Natural gas extraction

Template:Infobox PAhistoric In 1880, the Morgan Oil Company drilled a well at Alexander McGuian's farm in South Strabane Township.[20] The second well attempt, reaching a depth of 2,247 feet (685 m), hit a large pocket of natural gas.[20] It was the largest flow of natural gas in the world.[20] The rush of uncaptured gas could be heard for miles.[21] Historian Earle Forrest described the event, saying that "one of nature's marvels had been uncorked".[21]

A year of wasted gas flow passed before the flow was tapped into a 6 inches (150 mm) pipe to Pittsburgh.[20] By 1885, 5 wells in the Canonsburg area had been drilled, growing to 17 by November 1, 1886.[20] The success of this well initiated the beginning and development of the great oil and gas fields in southwestern Pennsylvania.[22]

In 1967, the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission erected a historical marker in honor of McGugin Gas Well well along Pennsylvania Route 18 northwest of Washington.[22] The marker has since gone missing.[22]

In 1884, Citizens Natural Gas Company drilled a well 2,191 feet (668 m) deep on the Gantz mill property, near the Chestnut Street station of the Pennsylvania Railroad.[20] The well hit a sand formation, now known as the Gantz Sand, that produced oil, surprising the company.[20] That sand formation is known as the Gantz Sand.[20] This was the first oil well in Washington County and set off an oil boom in the area.[20][23]

Within 3 months, 21 wells were drilled throughout the county.[20] One well at a depth of 2,392 feet (729 m) by People's Light and Heat Company on the Gordon farm north of Washington was the deepest producing oil well in the world.[20] Production levels exploded in 1886; May production levels were from 4,000 barrels per day, rising to 10,120 barrels per day in June, and peaking at 17,549 barrels per day in October.[21] Contemporary reports indicate that over 100 derricks were visible from the LeMoyne well on Prospect Avenue.[21] The boom was especially notable in Murdocksville, Burgettstown, Cross Creek, and Cherry Valley.[21] This increase in oil production signaled a shift in the center of the Pennsylvania oil industry from Northwestern Pennsylvania (home to the Drake Well) to Southwestern Pennsylvania, particularly Washington County.[24]

Washington & Jefferson College also owned oil wells; in 1885 the college purchased the old Washington Fairgrounds and transformed it into a college athletic facility (eventually Cameron Stadium) by erecting oil wells on the grounds.[25]

The boom and subsequent development lasted around 20 years, dropping significantly around shortly after the turn of the century.[21] The last oil was shipped around 1916.[26]

In 1953, the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission erected a historical markers in honor of the well along West Chestnut Street in Washington.[26]Template:Refn The West Virginia Division of Culture and History erected a historical marker noting the Gantz Sand in Aurora, West Virginia.[17]

Natural gas development in Marcellus Shale

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In the mid 2000s, Washington County would become central to the rebirth of the resource extraction industry, with the development of the hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale.

Opposition

Several prominent groups in Pennsylvania, such as ProPublica and the Heinz Endowments,have spoken out against oil and gas drilling in their state. These groups argue that oil and gas drilling, especially Hydraulic Fracturing are dangerous and that their danger to both health and the environment has been misrepresented by oil and gas companies.


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Development of the Pennsylvania Oil Industry". American Chemical Society National Historic Chemical Landmarks. Retrieved 23 March 2013. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Black, Brian; Marcy Ladson (May 2010). "Oil at 150: Energy Past and Future in Pennsylvania". Pennsylvania Legacies 10 (1): 6–13. doi:10.5215/pennlega.10.1.6. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Black, Brian (April 1998). "Oil Creek as Industrial Apparatus: Re-Creating the Industrial Process through the Landscape of Pennsylvania's Oil Boom". Environmental History 3 (2): 210–229. doi:10.2307/3985380. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Samuel Kier - Medicine Man & Refiner". Oil 150. Retrieved 23 March 2013. Category:All articles with dead external linkswikipedia:Category:Articles with dead external links from August 2014Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template[dead link]
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 "Early Oil in Pennsylvania". Eno Petroleum Corporation. Retrieved 23 March 2013. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1896". World Digital Library. 1896. Retrieved 2013-07-16. 
  7. ↑ Pees, Samuel T. "Drake's Well". Oil History. Petroleum History Institute. Retrieved 24 March 2013. 
  8. ↑ "Edwin Drake". They Made America. PBS. Retrieved 24 March 2013. 
  9. ↑ Hildegarde, Dolson (1959). The Great Oildorado: The Gaudy and Turbulent Years of the First Oil Rush: Pennsylvania, 1859-1880. New York: Random. p. 277. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Toyoda, Taro (July 2007). "Oil Rush: Looking for the Land & Petroleum". Osaka Keidai Ronshu 54 (2): 187–218. Retrieved 25 March 2013. Category:All articles with dead external linkswikipedia:Category:Articles with dead external links from August 2014Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template[dead link]
  11. ↑ Hildegarde, Dolson (1959). The Great Oildorado: The Gaudy and Turbulent Years of the First Oil Rush: Pennsylvania, 1859-1880. New York: Random. p. 87. 
  12. ↑ Churella, Albert J. (2012). The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. p. 366. 
  13. ↑ Hildegarde, Dolson (1959). The Great Oildorado: The Gaudy and Turbulent Years of the First Oil Rush: Pennsylvania, 1859-1880. New York: Random. p. 80. 
  14. ↑ Olien, Roger M.; Diana Davids Olien (2000). Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina. p. 31. 
  15. ↑ G.R. Hopkins and A.B Coons, "Crude petroleum and petroleum products, in Statistical Appendix to the Minerals Yearbook, 1932-33, US Bureau of Mines, 1934, p.306.
  16. ↑ Hunter, John L. (January 1917). "Over Old Trails: Washington, Pennsylvania--One of the Keystone State's Educational Center--The Discovery of Oil and Gas Transforms the Straggling Village Into a Commercial Center--A Chapter of Incidents". The Oil and Gas Man's Magazine. 11-12. pp. 19–36. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 "Gantz Sand" (Database search). West Virginia Highway Markers Database. West Virginia Division of Culture and History. 
  18. ↑ Clapp, Frederick Gardner. "Brief History of Development in Washington County". Economic Geology of the Amity Quadrangle, Eastern Washington County, Pennsylvania. United States Government Printing Office. p. 52. 
  19. ↑ Pepper, James F.; Wallace DeWitt, Jr. and David F. Demarest (1954). "Geology of the Bedford Shale and Berea Sandstone in the Appalachian Basin" (PDF). Geological Survey Professional Paper 259. United States Geological Survey. p. 37. Retrieved January 19, 2014.  Category:Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters
  20. ↑ 20.00 20.01 20.02 20.03 20.04 20.05 20.06 20.07 20.08 20.09 20.10 20.11 20.12 20.13 Clapp, Frederick Gardner. "Brief History of Development in Washington County". Economic Geology of the Amity Quadrangle, Eastern Washington County, Pennsylvania. United States Government Printing Office. pp. 44 to 45. 
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4 21.5 Branton, Harriet (2013). Washington County Chronicles: Historic Tales from Southwestern Pennsylvania. The History Press. p. 121. 
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named mcguginphmcdatabase
  23. ↑ "Gantz Oil Well Historical Marker". ExplorePAHistory.com. WITF-FM. 
  24. ↑ William, Charles E. (2008). Western Pennsylvania's Oil Heritage. Arcadia Publishing. p. 61. ISBN 9780738563046. 
  25. ↑ E. Lee, North (1991). "Chapter 2: A New College Football Team". Battling the Indians, Panthers, and Nittany Lions: The Story of Washington & Jefferson College's First Century of Football, 1890-1990. Daring Books. pp. 25–36. ISBN 978-1-878302-03-8. OCLC 24174022. 
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named gantzphmcdatabase
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