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IN THE BEGINNING . . .
The healthful balm, from Natureâs veriest spring.
The bloom of health and life to man will bring.
As from her depths the magic liquid flows.
To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.
âadvertisement for Kierâs Petroleum, early nineteenth century1
Through the ages, long before methane was removed from deep in the earth through a process known as hydraulic fracturing or âfracking,â its seemingly strange properties confounded those who happened upon it seeping from the ground. In ancient Greece, or so the story goes, a goatherd moving his flock stumbled upon a burning flame on Mount Parnassus in Delphi, and he knew that he had witnessed the divine. Local wise men built a temple to Apollo at the site where the fumes of methane and other gases seeped from the ground.
From roughly 700 B.C. to A.D. 380, a long succession of priestesses, all named Pythia, went deep into the bowels of the temple and breathed deeply of the vapors that made the sacred flame burn. In 458 B.C., the clever Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote that the priestess, known as the Oracle of Delphi, would breathe fumes from a crack in the ground; upon deeply inhaling the magic vapors, she would go into a trance and become the voice of Apollo. Another Greek writer described how Pythia drank water with magic properties as it flowed from a spring into the temple chamber. The mythmakers of ancient Greece documented pilgrims coming from far and wide to learn their fates or to be given wise advice.
This incident was dismissed as legend until a team of scientists investigated the geology beneath the temple ruins and found evidence that methane had fueled the long-ago flame. They tested the nearby spring water and the mineral deposits on the ruins and discovered evidence of methane and ethane, as well as traces of the hallucinogenic gas ethylene. Traversing faults had shifted and collided, creating intense heat that, over eons, cooked the remnants of living matter from ancient seas into these hydrocarbon vapors. The gases escaped through faults, fractures, and other natural pathways to seep into the air and into the nearby spring.2
The bewitching properties of methane vapors escaping from the ground and ignited by lightning played a role in many of the worldâs oldest religionsâfrom the burning bush in Exodus to the eternal flames worshiped by the Hindus and Zoroastrians.
Today soothsayers are still divining the magic of methane. Across the globe, self-serving modern oraclesâfrom the financial centers that power the global economy to the powerful governments that make public policyâprophesy that natural gas will do everything from fixing the economy to solving the crisis of global climate change.
Odorless and colorless, natural gas expands to fill the area where it is contained. Unlike oil and water, it can be compressed, so its volume depends on the surrounding pressure and temperature. Naturally occurring gas is mostly methane, but it can include other components in various amounts, such as butane, hexane, propane, helium, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide, as well as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, which are extremely toxic hydrocarbons collectively known as BTEX.3 Over millions of years, layers of buried plants, sea animals, rocks, mud, and sand were subjected to extreme heat and pressure. The original energy taken in by these plants from the sun was transformed and stored deep underground in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas. That is, the sunâs energy was stored in the strength of the molecular bonds between the hydrogens and carbons that make up those hydrocarbon fuels. Once discovered, the desire to exploit this ancient energy has grown exponentially with each passing century.
It was the Chinese who first recognized the energy-giving properties of natural gas around 400 B.C., when they used it to boil saltwater in order to extract salt. Within a few centuries, the Chinese began methodically looking for gas, piping the fuel through bamboo tubes and in some cases refining it with the first known carburetor.4 They also pioneered drilling technologies in their search for water, drilling as deep as three thousand feet by dropping a heavy chiseling tool from a tall bamboo structure to pulverize the rock.5
The mysterious properties of gas also were known in North America. In 1626 French explorers noted that Native Americans lit gas seepages in the Lake Erie region, ironically where fracking is being pursued today. Long before settlers intruded into this region, the Mound Builders, then the Erie, and eventually the Iroquois inhabited it and made use of the gas rising from the ground. During his time as a surveyor, George Washington recorded a âburning springâ on the banks of the Kanawha River near where Charleston, West Virginia, is located today.6
No resourceful European colonists are recorded taking advantage of the seeping gas until William Aaron Hart came along. A talented gunsmith, he also invented and patented the percussion capâa lock-and-ignition system for guns. Hart observed gas bubbles in a creek in western New York. In 1825 he hand-dug a well that was almost thirty feet deep and used hollowed-out logs to transport the gas a short distance to provide lighting in the small village of Fredonia, New York.
Hart soon built a rudimentary storage vat to hold the gas, called a gasometer, and transported it through lead and tin pipes to thirty-six gaslights in Fredonia. When the town was incorporated in 1829, the city fathers included five oil-light burners in the town seal, and there is still a street near the wellâs location named after him. Hart eventually moved to Buffalo, becoming a successful businessman with the Buffalo Gas Lighting Company.7
Although Hart moved on, the modern story of gas in the area around Fredonia was just beginning, and the battle over fracking was far in the future. In 1857, a distant relative of Hartâs through marriage, twenty-six-year-old Preston Barmore, convinced prosperous local residents to invest in a gas company. A graduate of Fredonia Academy, a forerunner of the State University of New York at Fredonia, he obviously had done his research. Barmore and his associates were not content to rely on gas seepages for their new business. Based on a geological report, they purchased property and began using a crude method of drilling. A four-inch-diameter hole was bored more than 120 feet into the hard rock, and when no gas appeared, Barmore used gunpowder to create an explosion to release the gas (and water), creating the first gas well.8
By 1858 Barmore had drilled two wells that produced enough gas and water to pipe into the town. He incorporated the first gas company in the country, eventually named the Fredonia Natural Gas Company. By 1859, gas-flame lights had been installed in most stores and businesses in Fredonia.9
Around the same time, sixty miles from Fredonia, Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the first oil and gas well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.10 A colorful character, Drake had never served in the military but adopted the title of colonel to impress the local townspeople with his respectability. Even so, they began to call him crazy as he struggled to capture the oil that they had seen seeping from the ground.11 Drake had been hired by a group of speculators who secured land leases after hearing reports of oil in western Pennsylvania and were privy to a Yale chemistry professorâs report of its use for lighting and lubrication. After many false starts, Drake decided that the methods used in salt mining were the solution.12
Salt recovery was a thriving business in many regions of the country, and oil and gas were often waste products. Drake traveled to a salt mine in nearby Tarentium, Pennsylvania, to observe the techniques and look for equipment and workers. He hired an experienced salt driller, William âUncle Billyâ Smith, to help manage the drilling project.13 Drake and Smith refined the cable-tool drilling technique employed by the nineteenth-century salt industry, in a process very similar to the one used by the Chinese centuries before. Fueled by a steam engine, a two-foot chisel hanging by a rope from a wooden structure was lifted and dropped, creating a deeper hole each time. He encountered the same problem that Barmore had experienced: water filled the hole as he went deeper. So Drake pounded a pipe into the bedrock and drilled within itâan innovative solution that protected the upper part of the well from cave-ins and kept the water outside of the pipeâs perimeter.14
Although the local townspeople laughed at âDrakeâs Folly,â on August 27, 1859, he made history as the oil and gas began to flow at sixty-nine feet. The well was destroyed in a fire when Uncle Billyâs lamp ignited the gas. Drake never patented his casing idea, and in his old age, while others were acquiring fortunes in the region, he was sick and poor. In 1873, at the urging of the residents of Titusville, the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized a $1,500 annual payment to him.15
Although the oil boom began almost immediately after Drake hit oil, it was not until 1872 that the gas from the area where he drilled was utilized. Transmitted in the first-ever long-distance metal pipe, it flowed five miles in a two-inch iron pipe to Newton, Pennsylvania.16
Interest in piping gas intensified, and other natural gas companies were organized. The United Natural Gas Company, a direct forerunner of the National Fuel Gas Company, built a pipeline between McKean County, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York. At eighty-seven miles, it was the longest on record during this period, and, frighteningly, parts of it are still in use. In 1899 the company improved long-distance transmission by using a compressor to pump the gas at a constant pressure.17 Today National Fuel Gas Company operates through many subsidiaries and is deeply involved in fracking.18
At almost the same time, in Indiana, Elwood Haynes invented a meter to measure gas flow and pressure as well as one of the first gas-regulating thermostats. A talented scientist, he studied chemistry, biology, and German at Johns Hopkins University. Although Haynes is remembered for creating Stellite, a hard metal used in toolmaking, in the 1890s, as a manager and owner of the Portland Natural Gas and Oil Company, he oversaw construction of one of the earliest natural gas pipelines. Extending from near Portland, Indiana, to Chicago, Illinois, it went a distance of 120 miles.19
Yet the wide use of long-distance pipelines was still many decades in the future. Gas is difficult to corral and pipe, and during this period it was usually viewed as a waste product to be vented, burned, or left in the ground. Most of the gas used in urban areas during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century was so-called manufactured gas, derived from coal, oil, and sometimes wood, and should not be confused with natural gas. During this period, manufactured gas for local use was produced in thousands of facilities in the United States and Europe.
The new magic of chemistry was used in these community-based facilities to create a combination of gases that could be burned for lighting, heating, or cooking. Created during a complex and highly polluting process, it left behind a legacy of toxic coal-tar components that include arsenic, benzene, leads, phenols, toluene, xylenes, and even cyanide. Once natural gas became available, the use of manufactured gas diminished in the 1920s, but its toxic legacy is still being remediated in some locations today.20
Although manufactured gas was the primary fuel for lighting cities, natural gas had been discovered in seventeen states by the turn of the twentieth century.21 Attempts to capture it depended largely on location, availability, and the cost of other fuels such as kerosene. Gas was used widely in the central Appalachians, the Gulf Coast, Southern California, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Between 1920 and 1940, as the population grew where gas was available, its use tripled.22
Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, Congress answered the demands of the oil and gas industry to financially support technological advancements f...
