How the Oil Pipeline Began

http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-the-oil-pipeline-began

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

70 36 9 years ago

What's so tricky about oil that it took so many attempts to make a pipeline? Other materials were flowing through pipelines for more than a hundred years at that point.

nfriedly2• 9 years ago

I think part of it is the distance - we've moved stuff through pipes before, but not the distance involved here. Leaky connections add up after a while.

Also, you know, it's rather flammable, which always adds some potential excitement.

ghshephard• 9 years ago

The article wrote about the challenge in making pipes two miles long. And the challenges written about in the article about early pipelines were about leaking, never about flammability.

dredmorbius9• 9 years ago

I'm sorry, but what major, high-flow, long-distance pipelines are you referring to having existed prior to 1859?

I'm not aware of any particularly significant examples.

The major exception would be water aqueducts, but these were not generally pipelines.

No major city had a long-distance water conduit or sewerage system by that time. London was just building its own sewerage system in 1860, and that comprised vaulted chambers of brick.

New York City's Catskills water system wasn't completed until 1915.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/history.shtm...

What was difficult was that, fundamentally, industrial manufacturing did not exist. Other than a small number of powered looms and ironworks.

That's cast and wrought iron. Bessemer steel had only just been patented (1856), but production wasn't scaled up for a number of years (initial attempts to license the method failed when licensees were unable to properly implement it).

Industrialisation is a rather significant bootstrapping process. Titusville Pennsylvania was a rural region, on the frontier, without access to viable transportation (that is, rivers or canals). Railroads existed, but with iron rather than steel rail, had limited tonnage capacity and were prone to splits rails.

Someone• 9 years ago

There may be _one_ example: the 40km wooden pipeline transporting brine from Hallstatt to Ebensee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt#Romans_onwards), starting in 1595.

Given that this is downhill (slightly; about 70 meters over 40km), according to Wikipedia, it wouldn't surprise me if this wasn't pressurized, though, and that, I think, is the essential difference between a covered duct and a pipeline.

thaumasiotes3• 9 years ago

China was piping natural gas over long distances in bamboo for many centuries before then. It would have been flowing for over a thousand years by 1859.

sporkenfang2• 9 years ago

How can we stop it and replace it with saner, greener tech (or replace the use of fossil fuels altogether)? That's the better question once we know how it got here.

acidburnNSA5• 9 years ago

Oil is about 40% of the primary energy used in the USA and primarily for transportation. So fewer cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes would help. One transatlantic flight uses an astounding amount of oil. So take very few of those! And live close to work and close to places you want to be.

On the other hand, electric vehicles can help a huge amount for cars and trucks at least. Then we shift the primary fuel to whatever being used by the utility company. That's mostly natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro in the USA, followed by a percent and growing of wind and solar.

Of dispatchable options, nuclear, wind, and solar have tiny carbon footprints. Nuclear has very small physical and fuel footprints and runs 24/7, so that's my current favorite. It's also way safer statistically than almost anyone thinks, having saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution deaths by 2013. Its fuel is also renewable because uranium dissolved in seawater will replenish through erosion faster than we could ever use it for billions of years.

Wind and solar are kicking ass right now. going global scale requires large footprints of storage, land, magnets, coils, etc. I imagine a future of 50/50 nuclear + various forms of solar harvesting.

spynxic• 9 years ago

Its fuel is also renewable because uranium dissolved in seawater will replenish through erosion faster than we could ever use it for billions of years.

It's been an hour and still no one's caught this but.. what exactly is this you're referring to? It'd be a fishy looking stoichiometric ratio if the fuel is produced from the seawater.

dredmorbius9• 9 years ago

Keep in mind that coal, as of the late 1800s in the U.S., was seen as a multi-million year supply. At then-current rates of use.

Thing is that the rates of use ... increased somewhat.

Exponential growth has a way of catching up with you.

Nuclear has a very long-term footpring and some unusual aspects relative to other energy systems. Many of its more notable critics come from inside the industry, or were early pioneers. I'm not so sanguine.

dredmorbius9• 9 years ago

If that's more than an idle question, I'd recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy Transitions:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-req...

The same author has just updated his book on energy in world history, this past May. I've read the earlier version and it is excellent, I have reason to believe the update is an improvement on that.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-hist...

sporkenfang2• 9 years ago

Thanks!

dredmorbius9• 9 years ago

The history of oil and its influence in more-or-less singlehandedly creating the modern world (with a helping hand from coal) is pretty phenomenal.

Daniel Yergin's book The Prize, and the BBC/PBS series of the same name, are absolutely epic. What's clear from both is how rapidly essentially modern concepts emerged: By 1865, six years after Colonel Drake's well was dug, railroad tank cars of welded iron looking much like today's DOT-111 cars existed. Similarly, oil pipelines.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOr8q_slscQNSXOzbaEUUZf...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-m...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car

The Internet Archive has numerous contemporary accounts, many reading not like 1990s "get rich quick on the Internet" books, on the particulars of the 1860s Pennsylvania oil boom. For example:

https://archive.org/details/oilregions00wrigrich

https://archive.org/stream/apracticaltreat01unkngoog#page/n1...

The travellogues are particularly poignant.

viewtransform• 9 years ago

I second that recommendation for Daniel Yergin's pulitzer prize winning book "The Prize". Oil as an energy source changed mankind. In addition to the history of oil in the US, it gave insight into the rising importance of oil during WWII (Hilter diverting his troops to capture the Baku oil field instead of focusing on Stalingrad), the post-war division of the world oil fields between the British and Americans (U.S. took Saudi Arabia (aramco), the Brits took Iran and Kuwait (anglo-persion and kuwait oil).

valuearb2• 9 years ago

i think you meant Hitler diverted troops intended for what he and his generals had agreed was their key objective, Baku, to battle over worthless Stalingrad.

Capturing Baku was the only chance the Nazis ever had of beating the russians.

madengr• 9 years ago

Nice article. Now I know the origin of the Teamsters. This scenario plays out time and time again as technological replaces workers. I suppose automated trucks will be no different.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

automated trucks will be interesting but this works for loads that the driver personally does not have to handle. the numbers may be higher when you think of all the drivers displaced from taxi services, bus drivers, and such.

akg_67• 9 years ago

Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing. Having started my career in Oil & Gas Pipelines, it made me nostalgic.

How the Oil Pipeline Began

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