
How the Oil Pipeline Began - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-the-oil-pipeline-began
======
dredmorbius
The history of oil and its influence in more-or-less singlehandedly creating
the modern world (with a helping hand from coal) is pretty phenomenal.

Daniel Yergin's book _The Prize_ , and the BBC/PBS series of the same name,
are absolutely epic. What's clear from both is how rapidly essentially modern
concepts emerged: By 1865, six years after Colonel Drake's well was dug,
railroad tank cars of welded iron looking much like today's DOT-111 cars
existed. Similarly, oil pipelines.

[https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOr8q_slscQNSXOzbaEUUZf...](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOr8q_slscQNSXOzbaEUUZf_83FeEyJZx)

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-
oil-m...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-money-
power/oclc/797007104&referer=brief_results)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car)

The Internet Archive has numerous contemporary accounts, many reading not like
1990s "get rich quick on the Internet" books, on the particulars of the 1860s
Pennsylvania oil boom. For example:

[https://archive.org/details/oilregions00wrigrich](https://archive.org/details/oilregions00wrigrich)

[https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1...](https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n10/mode/2up)

The travellogues are particularly poignant.

~~~
viewtransform
I second that recommendation for Daniel Yergin's pulitzer prize winning book
"The Prize". Oil as an energy source changed mankind. In addition to the
history of oil in the US, it gave insight into the rising importance of oil
during WWII (Hilter diverting his troops to capture the Baku oil field instead
of focusing on Stalingrad), the post-war division of the world oil fields
between the British and Americans (U.S. took Saudi Arabia (aramco), the Brits
took Iran and Kuwait (anglo-persion and kuwait oil).

~~~
valuearb
i think you meant Hitler diverted troops intended for what he and his generals
had agreed was their key objective, Baku, to battle over worthless Stalingrad.

Capturing Baku was the only chance the Nazis ever had of beating the russians.

~~~
verylittlemeat
So I started watching some of this series a few hours ago and the OP is
correctly referencing the documentary.

Paraphrasing: the documentary says the german fieldmarshal in Stalingrad
phoned Hitler and said they badly need more troops. Hitler responded 'what
good is your army without the oil you need to use it.'

~~~
valuearb
If course Paulus asked for more troops, Stalingrad was a meat grinder, exactly
the type of battle the germans could ill afford.

I'm writing this from memory, but my memory is the only reason they were there
was opportunism, they advanced faster than expected, and looked to take
Stalingrad easily despite it not being a strategic target. Then when they got
bogged down Hitler refused to allow retreat, he thought taking the city named
for Stalin would dishearten the russian people, and a german retreat would
inspire them. So he threw away a million man army he couldn't afford to lose.

And all while under-supplying the army in the Caucasus and dooming it to
failure.

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the_mitsuhiko
What's so tricky about oil that it took so many attempts to make a pipeline?
Other materials were flowing through pipelines for more than a hundred years
at that point.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm sorry, but what major, high-flow, long-distance pipelines are you
referring to having existed prior to 1859?

I'm not aware of any particularly significant examples.

The major exception would be water aqueducts, but these were _not_ generally
pipelines.

No major city had a long-distance water conduit or sewerage system by that
time. London was _just_ building its own sewerage system in 1860, and that
comprised vaulted chambers of brick.

New York City's Catskills water system wasn't completed until 1915.

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/history.shtm...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/history.shtml)

What was difficult was that, fundamentally, industrial manufacturing did not
exist. Other than a small number of powered looms and ironworks.

That's _cast_ and _wrought_ iron. Bessemer steel had only _just_ been patented
(1856), but production wasn't scaled up for a number of years (initial
attempts to license the method failed when licensees were unable to properly
implement it).

Industrialisation is a rather significant bootstrapping process. Titusville
Pennsylvania was a rural region, on the frontier, without access to viable
transportation (that is, rivers or canals). Railroads existed, but with iron
rather than steel rail, had limited tonnage capacity and were prone to splits
rails.

~~~
thaumasiotes
China was piping natural gas over long distances in bamboo for many centuries
before then. It would have been flowing for over a thousand years by 1859.

~~~
snewk
that is incredibly interesting. do you have a source for more reading?

~~~
dredmorbius
If you want your mind blown on China and technology: Joseph Needham, _Science
and Civilisation in China_.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China)

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madengr
Nice article. Now I know the origin of the Teamsters. This scenario plays out
time and time again as technological replaces workers. I suppose automated
trucks will be no different.

~~~
Shivetya
automated trucks will be interesting but this works for loads that the driver
personally does not have to handle. the numbers may be higher when you think
of all the drivers displaced from taxi services, bus drivers, and such.

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sporkenfang
How can we stop it and replace it with saner, greener tech (or replace the use
of fossil fuels altogether)? That's the better question once we know how it
got here.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Oil is about 40% of the primary energy used in the USA and primarily for
transportation. So fewer cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes would help. One
transatlantic flight uses an astounding amount of oil. So take very few of
those! And live close to work and close to places you want to be.

On the other hand, electric vehicles can help a huge amount for cars and
trucks at least. Then we shift the primary fuel to whatever being used by the
utility company. That's mostly natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro in the
USA, followed by a percent and growing of wind and solar.

Of dispatchable options, nuclear, wind, and solar have tiny carbon footprints.
Nuclear has very small physical and fuel footprints and runs 24/7, so that's
my current favorite. It's also way safer statistically than almost anyone
thinks, having saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution deaths
by 2013. Its fuel is also renewable because uranium dissolved in seawater will
replenish through erosion faster than we could ever use it for billions of
years.

Wind and solar are kicking ass right now. going global scale requires large
footprints of storage, land, magnets, coils, etc. I imagine a future of 50/50
nuclear + various forms of solar harvesting.

~~~
spynxic
> Its fuel is also renewable because uranium dissolved in seawater will
> replenish through erosion faster than we could ever use it for billions of
> years.

It's been an hour and still no one's caught this but.. what exactly is this
you're referring to? It'd be a fishy looking stoichiometric ratio if the fuel
is produced from the seawater.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Good catch! This is a pretty epic idea but it is defensible. Here I quote from
a paper linked below:

"One additional aspect of nuclear sustainability—noted long-since by Bernard
Cohen—is that a significant fraction of the nuclear fission energy resource is
in fact completely “renewable” in the same sense as wind and solar energy
[32]. Wind and rain constantly erode the Earth’s crust, which contains an
average uranium concentration of 3 parts per million. Rivers then carry this
dissolved uranium into the oceans, at a rate of approximately 10,000 MT per
year [33]. In a breeder reactor energy system, this is a sufficient rate to
supply the world’s entire electricity demand at the present time more than
five times over—or is roughly one quarter of what’s needed to supply a
continual 100 TW to a hypothetical global civilization of 10 billion persons
which is energy supply-replete by any contemporary measure.

As the crust is being eroded by rivers, it is constantly replaced by new
layers of rock being pushed upward by plate tectonic processes. The supply of
uranium in the Earth’s crust is effectively inexhaustible, on the order of 40
trillion metric tonnes, a factor of 10,000 more than is present in the oceans.
At present erosion rates, this source of uranium would last on the order of 4
billion years, similar to the timespan over which the Sun will become a red
giant.

Therefore, this assured source of “continually mined-by-Nature and oceanically
presented” uranium will last as long as life on Earth does—even if burned at
rates sufficient to supply a large fraction of a fully-developed human
civilization—and represents an astronomical amount of nuclear energy, one that
is in fact truly renewable and inexhaustible by any human measures."

[1]
[http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm](http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm)

~~~
sbierwagen
Note that uranium mined from seawater is about six times as expensive as
conventional uranium:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Uranium)

~~~
acidburnNSA
Indeed, which is why it's not done commercially today. Note also that total
fuel cost is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant, and that includes
mining, milling, enrichment, and fabrication. As seawater extraction becomes
cheaper and uranium mines run low (no time soon), it will basically be a wash
economically to switch to the renewable uranium. Also, breeder reactors don't
need you to enrich the fuel, so that counterbalances any increased extraction
cost. On the downside most (but not all) breeders require chemical
reprocessing which so far has been very expensive. With development this too
could go down.

The key point is that we would never run out of fuel as a species if we went
big with nuclear.

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akg_67
Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing. Having started my career in Oil &
Gas Pipelines, it made me nostalgic.

