History Of Oil - Blog Posts

tell about the history of oil?

Alright, so most of what I know about crude oil is from The History of Standard Oil, 1904, which was written by this very cool woman Ida Tarbell, who grew up in the oil fields in the late 1850s to 60s where her father worked and she saw numerous accidents and awful things there.

So, Oil was once very easy to find, it would often be floating ontop of ponds. For a long time it was turned into medicine by cranks and considered a nuisance byproduct in the salt industry. The first real use for oil was when people figured out it was good substitute for whale blubber in lamps, as that was incredibly smelly.

The first oil drillers were individual small businessmen in places like Ohio who shipped it to the cities by horse and cart and boat, though this was not to be for long. Railways were built and the first oil pipes were made in 1865.

John Rockefeller was the man who monopolised the Oil supply under the banner of Standard Oil, and he got into the business in 1860. His modus operandi is exactly like Jeff Bezos: he defeated his competitors by buying the entire supply chain, which meant he owned the refineries, the railroads, the towns the oil workers lived in and every business operated there.

Ida Tarbell managed to prove beyond any doubt that he'd secured control of the railroads like the Southern Railroad company via kickbacks and corruption, and her reporting was essential to railroad regulations passed in 1906 and court cases that entirely broke up the Standard Oil company in 1911.

To me, the fact that the public read a 400-page book, which led the USA's own courts to break the oil monopoly within only a few years is amazing. Nowadays, even worse things like the Panama Papers are exposed, yet the government does very little.

BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil are the awful offspring of this breakup. Unfortunately, even in its weak form, it seems the oil industry has had the last laugh (so far).

I have about a 90-year gap in my knowledge from there, but I do know some interesting facts

The first offshore oil rig, Neft Daşları, was made in 1949 in the USSR, where it was used to extract oil in the Caspian Sea.

Oil companies have known about climate change for decades, and their scientists made, highly accurate predictions about global warming in the 70's, which Oil companies covered up and lied about. This is a verified Conspiracy Fact™ ✅

Vice-President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton before he worked for Bush. Halliburton was given many lucrative contracts during the Iraq War, including supplying military bases.

Rex Tillerson was Secretary of State in the 1st Trump administration, he was an Exxon executive.

Peak Oil: oil supply will eventually peak, and production will slowly go down. This is true, but it is discredited in the public imagination because some environmentalists made doomsday predictions about it in the 90's. People also seem to think 'Peak Oil' means 'no oil'.

While oil production is still expanding, the discovery of oil reserves hit a peak in the 60's. Oil being extracted now is much lower quality and more expensive to get.

In a dark twist of irony, climate change has made new supplies of oil in Alaska and the Arctic accessible, which may prolong the life of the oil industry for decades to come.

Since around 2010, the Lakota and other indigenous peoples have led the resistance to the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline, due to the huge environmental cost building it would entail and the inevitability of leaks.