Read Online The End of Country by Seamus McGraw - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Seamus McGraw
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out, far longer than the primacy of Texas oil has.
I N THE MEANTIME, NATURAL GAS languished, and so did the Appalachian Basin. With the invention of electric light, gas ceased to be needed for streetlamps, since electricity could be produced morecheaply using coal as a fuel. Half of America’s electricity continues to be produced using coal. Natural gas was relegated to the background of the American energy picture: a useful fuel for cooking, perhaps for heating a few homes, but not much else. No longer the capital of American energy, the cities of the gas belt—such as Bradford, Pennsylvania, and Port Allegany—began the long, slow slide into rust belt oblivion, a slide that continued throughout the last century when even Quaker State, a company that traded on its Pennsylvania ties, pulled up stakes and headed for the Southwest.
Appalachia wasn’t completely fallow, of course. There were still some very active gas fields, places like the Big Sandy, a sprawling gas field straddling the West Virginia–Kentucky border that has produced a steady enough supply of gas since the 1920s to fill much of the limited desire for it. But such places were the exception and would remain so for generations.
At least three times over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of using natural gas as a primary fuel would resurface. Usually these initiatives took place in times of national crisis, and most often they were part of a campaign by the federal government to reduce oil consumption, or at least supplement it. In the 1930s, for example, as the nation was crawling out from under the Great Depression and gearing up for the war to come, the Roosevelt administration freed up some WPA cash to send a small army of geologists and engineers into the hinterlands of western New York and northern Pennsylvania to assess the potential stores of gas in the various subterranean layers of rock. The study was repeated four decades later by the Carter administration, after domestic U.S. oil production had already begun its rapid decline and after the oil shocks of the 1970s showed for the first time how vulnerable the nation had become to foreign markets. It was then that the geologists first turned up on Ellsworth Hill. But when each of those immediate challenges passed, so, too, did the interest in studying the gas, and the findings were relegated to the back shelves of libraries at a few universities. For the most part, and for most of the twentieth century, gas locked in the various Appalachian shales was considered either a nuisance or at best a sideshow to the real energy game. It was too hard to harness, and even if you could, the price it would fetch on the market wasn’t worth the effort.
From at least the 1930s on, the conventional wisdom was that theshales—there are several layers, the Marcellus being among the deepest and densest of them—were what geologists call source rocks. They were the incubators for gas and oil, and eventually they would be squeezed up into higher and more porous rocks or ooze down a layer into the Oriskany sandstone. The natural gas would infuse the oil, effectively making it more buoyant, and would pressurize it as well, driving it closer to the driller’s borehole. And when the last dregs of the oil were recovered, what gas remained could be stripped of its more liquid components—butane, propane, and pentane, all of which had their uses in everything from cigarette lighters to barbecue grills, devices never dreamed of when Hart was pumping his raw gas to Fredonia. The remaining methane could be piped to market if it was convenient, or it could simply be burned off, or the well could be sealed if shipping seemed to be too much trouble.
Of all the ancient shales, the Marcellus was, to those early roughnecks chasing oil and occasionally settling for gas, the most unpredictably volatile. Though a few lonely researchers had by the 1930s done a few early studies on the fractures—those fissures in
I N THE MEANTIME, NATURAL GAS languished, and so did the Appalachian Basin. With the invention of electric light, gas ceased to be needed for streetlamps, since electricity could be produced morecheaply using coal as a fuel. Half of America’s electricity continues to be produced using coal. Natural gas was relegated to the background of the American energy picture: a useful fuel for cooking, perhaps for heating a few homes, but not much else. No longer the capital of American energy, the cities of the gas belt—such as Bradford, Pennsylvania, and Port Allegany—began the long, slow slide into rust belt oblivion, a slide that continued throughout the last century when even Quaker State, a company that traded on its Pennsylvania ties, pulled up stakes and headed for the Southwest.
Appalachia wasn’t completely fallow, of course. There were still some very active gas fields, places like the Big Sandy, a sprawling gas field straddling the West Virginia–Kentucky border that has produced a steady enough supply of gas since the 1920s to fill much of the limited desire for it. But such places were the exception and would remain so for generations.
At least three times over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of using natural gas as a primary fuel would resurface. Usually these initiatives took place in times of national crisis, and most often they were part of a campaign by the federal government to reduce oil consumption, or at least supplement it. In the 1930s, for example, as the nation was crawling out from under the Great Depression and gearing up for the war to come, the Roosevelt administration freed up some WPA cash to send a small army of geologists and engineers into the hinterlands of western New York and northern Pennsylvania to assess the potential stores of gas in the various subterranean layers of rock. The study was repeated four decades later by the Carter administration, after domestic U.S. oil production had already begun its rapid decline and after the oil shocks of the 1970s showed for the first time how vulnerable the nation had become to foreign markets. It was then that the geologists first turned up on Ellsworth Hill. But when each of those immediate challenges passed, so, too, did the interest in studying the gas, and the findings were relegated to the back shelves of libraries at a few universities. For the most part, and for most of the twentieth century, gas locked in the various Appalachian shales was considered either a nuisance or at best a sideshow to the real energy game. It was too hard to harness, and even if you could, the price it would fetch on the market wasn’t worth the effort.
From at least the 1930s on, the conventional wisdom was that theshales—there are several layers, the Marcellus being among the deepest and densest of them—were what geologists call source rocks. They were the incubators for gas and oil, and eventually they would be squeezed up into higher and more porous rocks or ooze down a layer into the Oriskany sandstone. The natural gas would infuse the oil, effectively making it more buoyant, and would pressurize it as well, driving it closer to the driller’s borehole. And when the last dregs of the oil were recovered, what gas remained could be stripped of its more liquid components—butane, propane, and pentane, all of which had their uses in everything from cigarette lighters to barbecue grills, devices never dreamed of when Hart was pumping his raw gas to Fredonia. The remaining methane could be piped to market if it was convenient, or it could simply be burned off, or the well could be sealed if shipping seemed to be too much trouble.
Of all the ancient shales, the Marcellus was, to those early roughnecks chasing oil and occasionally settling for gas, the most unpredictably volatile. Though a few lonely researchers had by the 1930s done a few early studies on the fractures—those fissures in
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