Transitioning the global economy away from oil is a heroic task. Oil is embedded in the way nearly every major industry functions, for better and for worse. Although the science is all but unanimous in the finding that transitioning away from oil and toward emissions-free alternatives is critically important to planetary health and the quality of life for future generations, “we haven’t found a good substitute for oil, in terms of its availability and fitness for purpose,” in the words of the Brookings Institute.
How did oil, in just a little over 150 years, come to take over the entire world?
Crude bitumen – a sludgy naturally occurring form of petroleum – was used more than 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, and was used by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians in architecture, building roads, caulking ships, and medicines. Oil was also used in China as far back as 600 B.C., during which time the Chinese made use of the fuel by transporting the black gold in pipes fashioned out of bamboo. But then the use of oil dried up and disappeared for nearly 2,500 years. The Romans knew about oil, but viewed it as nothing more than a curiosity.
For thousands of years, the making of the modern world was waiting right there under the ground, until Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the world’s first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859.
Oil was already prevalent in the area, and the Seneca tribe that lived in pre-Columbian Pennsylvania used oil that naturally rose to the surface of the earth – known as ‘seep oil’ – for a wide variety of purposes for hundreds of years. But drilling down into the Earth to extract this known resource changed the game – and the entire world as we know it.
“By the end of 1859 wells sprouted throughout the oil country,” writes the American Chemical Society (ACS). “In 1860 wells in northwestern Pennsylvania produced several hundred thousand barrels and by 1862 production reached three million barrels. The nation’s oil bonanza had begun, and huge fortunes would soon be made.”
However, the ensuing decades were volatile for oil and oil companies, as the Pennsylvania oil industry was characterized by wildcatting as well as wild characters, and dramatic booms and busts. For a time, it seemed as though oil would become obsolete, thanks to electrification and Thomas Edison’s lightbulb removing the need for oil-burning lamps. But then the first Model T Ford rolled off the production line at the turn of the century and forever cemented the centrality of oil and its derivatives in the making of the modern world.
Several developments over the late 19th and early 20th centuries galvanized oil’s global takeover. In the United States, the consolidation and later monopolization of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil provided regulation and regularity to what was until then a wild and volatile industry. Then, the critical utility and reliability of oil in the global economy was shored up in World War I, when it became clear that oil was the one resource able to power a global naval arms race.
Oil is a tremendously useful resource. It is used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, to produce electricity, and as a raw material in ubiquitous products including plastics, polyurethane, solvents, and hundreds of other intermediate and end-user goods. The use of oil is so widespread that it has essentially become invisible. Nearly everything you use and consume in a day has been brought to you by oil in some way or another, either in its makeup or in the shipping routes that brought it to your door.
Because of its central role in… well, everything… the possession of oil reserves has arguably come to be the single most critically important factor in global geopolitics. The birth of the oil industry propelled the United States into a nearly unimpeachable superpower status, which has been maintained in large part through new and strategic oil production booms including the recent shale revolution.
Saudi Arabia was a vast desert sparsely populated by nomadic peoples and virtually ignored by the rest of the world when an American-owned oil well in Dhahran drilled down into what would soon be identified as the largest source of petroleum in the world in 1938. Just 12 years later, U.S. President Harry S. Truman was already kowtowing to the freshly powerful Saudis, writing promises of U.S.-backed security to King Ibn Saud. “No threat to your Kingdom,” the president wrote, “could occur which would not be a matter of immediate concern to the United States.”
Nearly a century later, much has changed. But at the same time, very little has changed. We are heading more rapidly and decidedly toward a renewable revolution, but one look at the geopolitical map makes one thing very clear – for today, tomorrow, and the near future, oil is still king.
Source: By Haley Zaremba from Oilprice.com