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By Root 812 0

a piece of land wasn’t just its acreage, but its volume. What was under one’s house was quite likely to be more valuable than the house itself. If windmills turned air into water, oil wells turned earth into cash. A photo taken a few years later shows a simple well. Its caption reads, “Source of the world’s most gigantic fortunes—pumping wells in the oil country—western Pennsylvania.”7 Indeed, just in 1870, before the area was producing at full capacity, oil wells made their owners and operators $19.3 million.8 Not bad for a backwater part of the country that even now remains largely undeveloped.

The end of the Civil War quickened the pace of development. Veterans returning from the front went out looking for places to make money, and they found them in places like Pit Hole, one of the fields discovered in 1865. During its time at the top, the Oil Creek Valley, which became known as Petrolia, gave up fifty-six million barrels of oil. As more people poured into the oil regions and more and more torpedoes got sent down wells, “supply outran demand” and soon the whiskey barrels that held the oil “cost almost twice as much as the oil inside them.”9

The cheap supply let inventors experiment with a tremendous energy source. Beyond the money the good wells were making their owners, they were also extracting an incredible amount of energy from the ground. One team of researchers have estimated that for every unit of energy early oil prospectors invested sinking a well, they got back “more than 100 times as much usable energy.”10

Oil was—and is—uniquely convenient. It is what’s called energy dense: To equal the amount of energy in a tank of gasoline, you would need to burn two hundred pounds of wood. It’s stable, meaning it doesn’t explode randomly. And it’s a liquid, which means that you can store it in barrels or tanks and transport it in a pipeline. It was the killer app for the infrastructure age.

Thus, the American fossil-fuel era had begun. And then, just as quickly as it burst onto the scene, the oil fields in Petrolia started to give out. The brutal logic of the rule of capture, a glorified “finder’s keepers” for oil, meant that everyone was incentivized to pump and torpedo as much as possible in order to just get the oil first. It’s a blindingly simple rule that drove the entire development of the region. If you could pump it, you could sell it. So people pumped as fast and as hard as they could. And then the forests of derricks pumping slowed to a halt. People left. Towns died. The trees rushed back in on the place.11

Petrolia, the river valley in Pennsylvania, was done for, but Petrolia, the American condition, was beginning. Huge oil field finds in Texas and California in the early twentieth century meant that America could basically treat oil as free for the next seventy years. By the time oil surpassed coal as the most burned fuel in the country, Americans had become dependent on the strange, energy-dense liquid created under unusual conditions millions of years ago.

The change wasn’t immediate. The best days still lay ahead for windmills and wave motors and horses and coal. But Petrolia lit a fuse that would run through the entire century until it exploded in 1973 during the OPEC oil crisis. During that time Americans realized they had built a country on a fuel source that was no longer coming up from the domestic geology. Finding oil had become increasingly more difficult. And the world is now experiencing the same thing. Oil usage has outpaced new finds for decades. No one can say exactly when, but some day soon the world’s oil production will begin a long decline.

chapter 8

Wave Motors and Airplanes

A YOUNG MAN WITH ARTISTIC aspirations could not have resisted the crowds of Market Street on a Saturday night. Nothing was more San Francisco than the street that cut through its heart. Like a weekly fair, all classes of society and the many flags of a port town mixed on the promenade from Powell to Kearny. “Everybody, anybody, left home and shop, hotel, restaurant, and beer garden to empty into Market