The Oil Drum | Stories tagged with "oil history"

Stories tagged with "oil history"

150 Years of Plenitude: The Story of Oil

Posted by Gail the Actuary on August 27, 2009 - 10:34am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: oil history, oil supply, original [list all tags]

This post is a guest post by Morgan Downey. Morgan is author of the book ‘Oil 101’.

Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, on August 27, 1859, the first commercial oil well in the US began producing. The subsequent petroleum bounty has enabled and defined modern civilization.

This post is a status update in honor of the day--on how far we have come and our immediate challenges.

Graphic by author, based on prices of illuminants in the mid 1850s from 'Artificial Light' by Matthew Luckiesh.

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“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905