Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

“I’m trying to get a nice spread,” I tell them.

From Alberta, a powerful suction pulls south. And so they would like to build a pipeline. Another pipeline, that is—longer and better than what’s already there. Leaving Canada, it would pass underneath the Alberta-Montana border and run clear through the heart of the United States to the Gulf Coast, ending at a clutch of refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it is called, argue that it would pose unacceptable environmental risks, even leaving aside the issue of how dirty oil sands oil is. The pipeline, three feet in diameter and buried underground, would transport diluted bitumen through such ecologically invaluable regions as the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and is also a major drinking water supply. The threat to the Ogallala, the argument goes, is too great a risk to take. And then there’s the question of whether the project would even be economically viable.

Pipeline supporters, on the other hand, claim that Keystone XL would be reliable and safe, and they contend that it would double the amount of oil sands oil that can be imported to the United States.

What Keystone XL definitely has going for it, though, is irresistible symbolic value. Judged by this admittedly dubious metric, a pipeline connecting northern Alberta and Port Arthur, Texas, is almost too good to pass up. Because if the oil sands represent the future of the oil industry, then Port Arthur represents its past, even its birth. And Keystone XL, should it be built, would physically link the two, feeding the future to the past, and tying the history of petroleum up in a tidy bow.

They called it folly. To most people, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that there was oil waiting underneath the low hill known as Spindletop, near Beaumont, in Southeast Texas. But Patillo Higgins had been obsessed with it for nearly a decade. A local businessman and self-taught geologist, he had led multiple failed attempts to find oil under the hill, and still he persisted. The quintessential example of an entrepreneur driven beyond sound judgment, Higgins spent year after year chasing oil with nothing to show for it. He pursued his goal with a faith matched only by his own religious dogmatism, and even ceded ownership of his own company to attract new investors—all in an age when oil was used only for lamp fuel and lubricants. As a business plan, it was idiotic.

On the morning of January 10, 1901, Higgins wasn’t even on Spindletop. Neither was his drilling contractor, a similarly obsessed, Croatian-born engineer called Anthony Lucas. They had no idea what was about to happen. Not even the drilling crew, as they ground the well deeper, past 1,100 feet, knew what they were about to unleash on Texas and the world. No idea that by lunchtime their well would be producing more oil than every other oil well in the country—combined.

It was the first gusher: the violent fountain of oil that in the old days would explode out of the ground when a new well broke through to a rich deposit. (Go see There Will Be Blood if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Nowadays, drillers understand how to control such things, but the gusher remains an archetypal American moment, as central to our folklore of wealth as gold rushes and tech IPOs.

Beginning on that January morning, the well called Lucas No. 1, or the Lucas Gusher, ran for nine days, spewing millions of gallons of oil onto the ground before it was brought under control. PURE OIL SPOUTING HIGH IN THE AIR—MUCH EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY ran the headline in Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise on that first day. Just how much excitement can be traced in the work of the Enterprise headline writers over the following week:

January 12: MANY OIL PROSPECTORS ARRIVED TODAY.

January 14: FEVERISH AND EXCITED…BIG THINGS PLANNED WHICH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.

January 15: EXCITEMENT STILL HIGH. EVERYBODY GRABBING FOR LAND—PRICES SKY HIGH.

Their best effort, at once breathless and circumspect, ran on January 16: CROWDS STILL COME!…VARIOUS RUMORS OF IMMENSE TRANSACTIONS BUT VERIFICATION WAS NOT OBTAINABLE.

Within months, the population of Beaumont had quintupled; the sleepy town of Port Arthur, twenty miles down the road, was on its way to becoming a petrochemical mecca—and the Texas oil boom was on.

An oil industry already existed in the United States at the time. It had been built by John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries, following discoveries made in Pennsylvania starting in the late 1850s. But oil had nothing like the dominance it has today. The internal combustion engine barely existed, plastic was decades away, and gasoline was considered an uninteresting refinery byproduct. Kerosene, the world’s first bright, clean-burning lamp fuel, was the real game.

The Lucas Gusher produced more oil than anybody knew what to do with. Well after well was sunk into Spindletop in an orgy of drilling and speculation, and hundreds of new oil companies sprang up; you may recognize names like Texaco, Humble (now ExxonMobil), and Gulf (now Chevron). In Beaumont, the price of a barrel of oil dropped to below that of a barrel of water, so severe was the oversupply. Complicating this dilemma was the fact that this new Texas crude was ill-suited for making kerosene. Even if it had made for good kerosene, the writing was on the wall: kerosene lanterns were being replaced by electric lightbulbs.

The oil industry needed new markets. But what they eventually found—and founded—was a civilization. The dominoes began to fall almost immediately. First were the railroads: in 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had a single oil-powered locomotive; four years after the Lucas Gusher, it was running 227 of them. Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t far behind, changing over to fuel oil and lining up to take advantage of the glut. Mechanized agriculture and manufacturing took off in Texas, now suddenly the proving ground for the oil-based economy. Before long, the pattern was being repeated around the globe. Navies of the world switched to oil as well, signaling the abrupt geopolitical centrality of petroleum to the unfolding twentieth century.

And then there was the automobile, coming of age with eerie synchrony to the oil industry’s burgeoning second wave. Several energy sources had been proposed for cars, among them electricity, but oil’s new availability sealed the deal for the internal combustion engine. And the Texas crude refined nicely into gasoline. Before, gasoline had been considered a near-waste product; now it took its place next to fuel oil as the power source of the new age. It was time to pave America, and the rest of the world.

Over the following century, finding new markets for petroleum—new uses, new products, new classes of products—would prove to be one of the things that oil companies do best. And there is a direct line from the glut of oil on Spindletop to the omnipresence of petroleum today. As any oilman or environmentalist will tell you, oil seeps into every corner of our lives—our households, our economy, our politics. It fuels or abets almost everything we do, from tourism to warfare. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We live on oil, and by it, and its use is responsible for more than a third of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which, in an era of man-made climate change, is perhaps the most fundamental pollutant of all.

On Spindletop, though, on that January morning in 1901, all that was yet to come. Nobody knew that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be made of petroleum. And there had never been a gusher before. Nobody knew that a well could, without warning, explode into a glistening, green-black geyser. Nobody had ever danced in oil raining from the sky. When Lucas finally saw the roaring fountain that would immortalize his name, he just shouted, “ What is it? ”