Oil Spaces

Exploring the Global Petroleumscape

Carola Hein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367417512
• eBook ISBN: 9781000449495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Oil Spaces traces petroleum's impact through a range of territories from across the world, showing how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Over the past century and a half, industrially drilled petroleum has powered factories, built cities, and sustained nation-states. It has fueled ways of life and visions of progress, modernity, and disaster.

In detailed international case studies, the contributors consider petroleum's role in the built environment and the imagination. They study how petroleum and its infrastructure have served as a source of military conflict and political and economic power, inspiring efforts to create territories and reshape geographies and national boundaries. The authors trace ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial frameworks, in locations as diverse as Sumatra, northeast China, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kuwait as well as heritage sites including former power stations in Italy and the port of Dunkirk, once a prime gateway through which petroleum entered Europe.

By revealing petroleum's role in organizing and imagining space globally, this book takes up a key task in imagining the possibilities of a post-oil future. It will be invaluable reading to scholars and students of architectural and urban history, planning, and geography of sustainable urban environments.

Part I

Oil, Agency, and Territoriality

2

The Original North American Petroleumscape

Oil-and-Gas Empire, Petrochemical Nation

Carola Hein and Alan Lessoff

DOI: 10.4324/9780367816049-4

The first—and perhaps most all-encompassing—petroleum-created landscape emerged in the US. With its massive refinery and petrochemical complexes; its pipelines crisscrossing the continent; its petroleum-oriented ship channels, offshore rigs, and tanker-loading platforms; with its land use configurations, employment patterns, institutions, political economy, and material culture all tracing their character to oil as a business and as a way of life, the US serves as a case in point for the analysis featured in this book.¹

By the late 1850s—when petroleum’s commercial potential became evident—coal mining and steam technology had already incorporated fossil fuels into transportation, industry, and everyday life. By the mid-century, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other eastern and midwestern industrial cities were becoming hubs of coal-railroad-metalmaking complexes comparable to the German Ruhr region or the English Midlands. Even in coal-oriented US cities, considerable flux characterized business relations, labor and class structure, and urban geography throughout the late 1800s. With only loose path dependence on coal, these cities were open to the novel forms of capital investment and energy use that oil and gas represented. In addition, in entire US regions, especially the Southwest and West, urban and commercial networks and energy-use patterns were still in formative stages when the shift of energy regimes from coal to petroleum began to reshape cities and urban culture. The US was thus highly receptive to its landscape becoming the kernel of the global petroleumscape.²

Between the 1850s and 1950s, the US became oriented around the production, marketing, and consumption of petroleum. Freeways carved up cities, which stretched outward into a succession of freeways, subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks, the stereotyped manifestations of North America’s petroleumscape. This diffuse, segmented, multicentered urban form appeared with particular clarity in the US Southwest, whose urbanization, largely catalyzed by enormous oil and gas discoveries in the early twentieth century, took shape in tandem with the ubiquitous adoption of the automobile, without a firm legacy from the walking city and railroad eras. The petroleumscape came to pervade rural areas and small towns as well. Farms became part of the petroleumscape, dependent on gasoline and diesel machinery and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The extraction, refining, transportation, and consumption of petroleum reshaped rivers, coasts, and seas. The spatial patterns and material culture associated with oil and gas became fundamental to Americans’ imagination of themselves as a nation.

While the North American petroleumscape has distinctive aspects, its influence pervades the petroleumscape around the world. Driven by entrepreneurial and corporate capital rather than state enterprise, the US gave birth to vertically and horizontally integrated petroleum companies that came to control the industry in large parts of the world. At a time when European nations were still expanding (or even building) their colonial realms— often with an eye on access to oil—entrepreneurs from the US were constructing a neocolonial system of multinational energy firms, whose networks of extraction, processing, and marketing spanned the globe. This petroleumscape grew to include built infrastructures and urban forms in select locations outside the US, but only to the extent that these served the main purpose of the company: the extraction, refining, and selling of petroleum.

This chapter explores the early North American petroleumscape, from the 1850s into the years after World War II, with an emphasis on the many ways the petroleum industry reshaped cities, urban networks, and relations between regions within the US and across the North American continent. As the chapter moves into the twentieth century, it expands geographically from petroleum’s initial base in Pennsylvania and Ohio to what historian Carl Abbott has termed the “Energy West.”³ The petroleum-driven transformation of the territory from Houston to Los Angeles began with spectacular oil booms in Southern California and East Texas in the 1890s and early 1900s. This transformation ended with Houston as the energy industry’s global headquarters, and with immense swaths of the continent—from Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico through Oklahoma and Colorado and onward into Alberta and Alaska—an interconnected system of exploration, drilling, refineries, pipelines, and petrochemicals.

The North American Petroleumscape in the Kerosene Era

The North American oil story began in Western Pennsylvania, near Titusville north of Pittsburgh. There, Edwin Drake (1819–1880) drilled for oil in 1859, setting off the first oil rush. Once oil had been found, the main challenge involved transporting it to refining sites, with horse carts, ships, and pipelines all playing a role. By the early 1860s, railroads reached into the oil fields, allowing the slippery substance to be transported to Cleveland or Pittsburgh to be refined. As consumers adopted new uses of petroleum—in particular, it quickly replaced whale oil for lighting—businesses rapidly expanded storage, refining, and shipping capacities. Production increased from some 4,450 barrels in the first year to 220,000 barrels in 1860 and 2,114,000 barrels in 1861.

The Western Pennsylvania boom thus compelled the rushed creation of the first layer of the spatial petroleumscape, oil’s industrial footprint: petroleum’s extraction, storage, transformation, and transportation. During these early years, a large number of interests battled for control, among them John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland merchant who invested heavily in kerosene and naptha refining during the US Civil War. Combining technological innovation with aggressive business methods, Rockefeller and his partners made Cleveland the hub of the early oil industry. By the mid-1870s, their firm, Standard Oil, had acquired a network of refining operations in Atlantic coastal ports. By the 1880s, as Daniel Yergin points out, Standard Oil refineries in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Bayonne, New Jersey, together produced over a quarter of the world’s kerosene. Standard’s enormous Bayonne refinery along New York Harbor was a major reason that the New York area came to account for over 40 percent of Standard Oil’s production and nearly three-quarters of its exports. Oil refining also had a presence in the East Coast ports of Baltimore, Boston, and Portland, Maine, but their role was negligible next to New York/New Jersey and Philadelphia.⁴

Philadelphia’s durable role in both domestic and trans-Atlantic markets was built on the city’s history as a port, its status as terminus and headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and its strategic links to Western Pennsylvania. With extensive unbuilt land on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, the city offered ample rail and water infrastructure as well as access to water for the new industry. Philadelphia also offered a diverse, highly skilled industrial base that produced everything from locomotives and tools to textiles and beer. The boom-and-bust pattern of refineries in Philadelphia and their changing locations illustrate the ways in which the emerging industry explored locational preferences, inserted refineries into cities with favorable, pre-existing industrial bases and transportation networks, but then reshaped the infrastructure of those cities and redirected their development. The pattern underscores the power of consolidation in strategically located cities with strong infrastructural connections through rail, road, shipping, and pipelines.⁵

The location of oil facilities in the Philadelphia region depended on a range of factors, especially access to water, both for industrial processes and for shipping. By 1866, the city listed seven petroleum storage facilities and six refineries. Several more appeared by 1875. Disasters made safety a concern. Environmental considerations became an additional reason to relocate. The Belmont Petroleum Refinery was initially located between the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Schuylkill River, just above the Columbia Bridge where the Pennsylvania Railroad split from the Junction Railroad. This facility produced some two million gallons of petroleum products in 1868, but because it was located upstream from the municipal waterworks, its wastewater endangered the city’s drinking water supply. Along with other industrial properties in the vicinity, the Belmont Refinery ultimately closed, and the city bought the land as an extension of Fairmount Park. After the Belmont refinery stopped operations, two new petroleum centers emerged: one would disappear, while the other has lasted until the present era. Both were built on agricultural land within city limits, downstream from the drinking water intake, where it was easier for companies to create industrial complexes and to run new railroads (Figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 Locations of historical and modern refineries in Philadelphia and Marcus Hook. Map by Carola Hein and Arnoud de Waijer.

The Atlantic Refining Company, founded by Pittsburgh and Philadelphia investors, occupied a seventy-acre property on the Schuylkill just below the Point Breeze Gas Works. Like other Philadelphia industrial businesses at the time, the Atlantic refinery preferred to portray itself as modern but also scenic and in harmony with nature, not as a disruptive social and environmental force of Charles Dickens-style foreboding (Figure 2.2). In 1874, Standard Oil purchased the Atlantic Refining Company as part of its attempt to consolidate oil transport and refining into a single enterprise capable of weathering major setbacks, even the destruction of an entire facility. This happened in 1879, when lightning destroyed the Atlantic refinery along with several ships moored on its wharves. Two thousand men lost their jobs, and many of the seamen from the ship lost all their belongings. Standard Oil carried no insurance and had to pay for reconstruction. Yet the company was already big enough to absorb such a loss.⁶

FIGURE 2.2 The Atlantic refinery on the Schuylkill River depicted as an idyllic location nestled among apple orchards. Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company Advertisement, 1866. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania Railroad, meanwhile, purchased a large plot of land on the Delaware at Gre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Oil, Agency, and Territoriality
• Part II Oil, Materiality, and Cultural Practices
• Part III Oil Ecologies and Imaginaries
• Biographies
• Index