Spindletop gusher
On January 10, 1901, the Lucas gusher at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas blew oil 150 feet into the air at a rate of roughly 100,000 barrels per day — more than the entire rest of the world's wells combined. Within a year, Spindletop had over 200 wells, and the Texas oil industry that grew up around it produced more oil in 1902 than every Pennsylvania well had produced in their best year. American oil's center of gravity moved decisively from Appalachia to the Gulf Coast. Three of the largest oil companies in the world — Gulf Oil, Texaco, and Sun Oil — were founded directly to develop Spindletop and surrounding fields.
Spindletop also democratized oil to a degree Pennsylvania never had. Standard Oil had locked up most of the Northeast; Texas was beyond the reach of Standard's railroad rebates and pipeline networks. The Gulf Coast independents that emerged became Standard's first serious competitors and ultimately part of the political coalition that broke up the trust ten years later.
03 · Black Gold
Oil arrived as a curiosity — a medicine, a lamp fuel, a substitute for whale oil — and within fifty years had become the most strategic commodity on Earth. The first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. By 1911 a single American family controlled most of the world's refined oil. By 1914 the British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil at Churchill's insistence, and the country with the best oil reserves was no longer Britain. The 20th century is, in plain economic terms, the century the energy capital moved from Tyneside to Texas — and from Texas, eventually, to Riyadh.
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