Whether you live in Cheyenne or Charlotte, chances are the natural gas and oil that generate electricity for your house and fuel your car started their trip to you in a pipeline. The country has enough pipeline, buried underground, to wrap around the Earth more than a hundred times, and we’re in the process of building much more. For Inside Energy, Wyoming Public Radio’s Stephanie Joyce takes a look at how we ended up with this sprawling network.
When the first 25 barrels of commercial oil ever drilled gushed out of Edwin Drake’s Pennsylvania well in 1859, historian Susan Beates says he was totally unprepared for it.
“Even grabbed washtubs to help hold all the oil.”
There was no system in place to get the oil from the country’s first wells to refineries. So, the oil industry improvised: buying up whiskey barrels, molasses barrels -- any barrels they could get their hands on. But barrels weren’t terribly efficient.
“The barrel today is based on 42 gallons. The barrels were built to hold 44. And that allowed for 2 gallons of leakage.”
Leakage aside, it was also really expensive to move oil in barrels. Beates says that’s because the teamsters who manned the horse drawn wagons that moved the barrels charged exorbitant prices.
“Hundreds and hundreds of wagons following the same road, to get up to the same railroad terminal. The expense is just phenomenal.”
All that changed with Samuel Van Syckel, an early Pennsylvania oil trader. He wanted to break the teamster’s monopoly -- and he succeeded. The pipeline Van Syckel built was 5 miles long and 2 inches wide and could transport up to 2000 barrels a day from his wells to a nearby rail depot.
“Think how many wagons that would take, to transport that many barrels!”
Although oil continued -- and continues -- to be measured in barrels, it took just a few decades for the actual barrels to be rendered obsolete.
By 1920, the American Petroleum Institute estimates there were almost 40,000 miles of pipeline in the country. In the following decade, that number tripled, as welding technology made it easier to build long pipelines.
“Lines of pipe, alive with racing oil, run through forests and over plains to these silver disks.”
That’s an industry promotional video from the 1930s. Pipelines were revolutionizing the way people got energy and World War 2 pushed that revolution even further…. Up until the war, most of the east coast cities relied on coal because no one had built the pipelines to move natural gas long distances, from the places it was produced, like Texas, to the places it was being consumed. But then, German U-boats started bombing American oil tankers.
“People on the Atlantic seaboard are actually able to see the fires from these tankers that have been hit.”
That’s California State University history professor Chris Castaneda. The oil in those tankers was critical to the war machine. So, the government built the biggest, longest crude oil pipeline ever, from Texas to New Jersey -- the Big Inch. It took about a year but it worked. And then, the war ended and the Big Inch was sold off... to a Texas natural gas company that converted it to a natural gas pipeline… Castaneda says it was like opening the floodgates.
“Other groups of entrepreneurs realize there’s this huge market for natural gas in the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, New England.”
Companies built more pipeline in the next two decades than anytime before or since. Joseph Pratt is a professor of history and business at the University of Houston. He and Castenada -- who was once his student -- are among the few people who have studied that era of the nation’s pipeline history.
“The sexy part of oil and gas has always been exploration and production and the pipelines follow.”
But Pratt thinks it’s a good time to be looking back at the history of pipelines.
“You look at what we've built, this envy of the world pipeline grid…”
2.6 million miles of pipeline -- more than anywhere else in the world -- criss-crossing the country. But that pipeline grid doesn't work for the shale boom. While the Texas to New Jersey Big Inch pipeline is still operating, there are few pipelines that can carry oil and gas away from the new boom: places like North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
“There are pretty fundamental choices being made right now about the fuel of the future and these infrastructure questions are the first volley in the contest over which fuels it will be.”
As in, renewables or fossil fuels. Right now, industry projections anticipate the need for half a trillion -- with a T -- dollars of investment in systems to move oil and gas around the country over the next twenty years. The expansion is likely to rival that of the the 1950s and 60s. And Pratt says just like it did half a century ago, that kind of build-out would likely cement the nation’s commitment to a fossil fuel future.
