How the Oil Pipeline Began | Hacker News Reader

How the Oil Pipeline Began

nautil.us

70 pointsdnetesn36 comments

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.

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).

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.

So I started watching some of this series a few hours ago and the OP is correctly referencing the documentary.

Paraphrasing: the documentary says the german fieldmarshal in Stalingrad phoned Hitler and said they badly need more troops. Hitler responded 'what good is your army without the oil you need to use it.'

If course Paulus asked for more troops, Stalingrad was a meat grinder, exactly the type of battle the germans could ill afford.

I'm writing this from memory, but my memory is the only reason they were there was opportunism, they advanced faster than expected, and looked to take Stalingrad easily despite it not being a strategic target. Then when they got bogged down Hitler refused to allow retreat, he thought taking the city named for Stalin would dishearten the russian people, and a german retreat would inspire them. So he threw away a million man army he couldn't afford to lose.

And all while under-supplying the army in the Caucasus and dooming it to failure.

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.

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.

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.

True, I amended mine to mention the leaks. The article did mention fires in train cars, and it was at least a potential concern in the pipelines.

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.

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.

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.

that is incredibly interesting. do you have a source for more reading?

https://www.amazon.com/Genius-China-Science-Discovery-Invent...

If you want your mind blown on China and technology: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_...

Info on Chinese drilling techniques, though little on pipes.

http://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/ancient-chinese-drilli...

That's true, though I've found information on this very hard to come by.

Keep in mind as well that natural gas differs markedly from petroleum on a number of accounts: it's lighter, leaks in open air are somewhat less a problem (the gas dissipates rather than pooling on the ground and contaminating soil, buildings, etc.). Though it's also a terrific fire hazard, which makes me wonder about China's experience with this.

Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China is apparently one of the authoritiative sources. I've access to a copy nearby, and may see what turns up there.

Otherwise: there's little mention of major pipelines. Take the following academic article, which makes mention of clay, stone, lead, and copper piping of ancient Egypt and Rome, briefly mentions China ... and then skips forward to Colonel Drake and Titusville.

The case that there was a booming practice of laying pipe prior to 1859 doesn't stand to inspection.

http://www.engr.mun.ca/~spkenny/Courses/Undergraduate/ENGI86...

It seems from a cursory search that they weren't pipelines so much as vessels that people carried around, like a primitive propane tank, but that's still pretty impressive.

Search a little harder.

"During the Tang dynasty, a gazetteer of Sichuan province stated that at one of these 182 m (600 ft) 'fire wells', men collected natural gas into portable bamboo tubes which could be carried around for dozens of km (mi) and still produce a flame.[287] These were essentially the first gas cylinders; Robert Temple assumes some sort of tap was used for this device.[287]"

Can also find evidence of them sticking a bamboo shoot into the well and lighting the gas that comes out on fire. But not anything concrete about them piping it long distances.

True, but see elsewhere in this thread: there's documentation of fairly extensive piping systems, though specific quantitative assessments are hard to find. I've been looking off-and-on for a few years.

thaumasiotes's comment above was worse than useless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Good catch! This is a pretty epic idea but it is defensible. Here I quote from a paper linked below:

"One additional aspect of nuclear sustainability—noted long-since by Bernard Cohen—is that a significant fraction of the nuclear fission energy resource is in fact completely “renewable” in the same sense as wind and solar energy [32]. Wind and rain constantly erode the Earth’s crust, which contains an average uranium concentration of 3 parts per million. Rivers then carry this dissolved uranium into the oceans, at a rate of approximately 10,000 MT per year [33]. In a breeder reactor energy system, this is a sufficient rate to supply the world’s entire electricity demand at the present time more than five times over—or is roughly one quarter of what’s needed to supply a continual 100 TW to a hypothetical global civilization of 10 billion persons which is energy supply-replete by any contemporary measure.

As the crust is being eroded by rivers, it is constantly replaced by new layers of rock being pushed upward by plate tectonic processes. The supply of uranium in the Earth’s crust is effectively inexhaustible, on the order of 40 trillion metric tonnes, a factor of 10,000 more than is present in the oceans. At present erosion rates, this source of uranium would last on the order of 4 billion years, similar to the timespan over which the Sun will become a red giant.

Therefore, this assured source of “continually mined-by-Nature and oceanically presented” uranium will last as long as life on Earth does—even if burned at rates sufficient to supply a large fraction of a fully-developed human civilization—and represents an astronomical amount of nuclear energy, one that is in fact truly renewable and inexhaustible by any human measures."

[1] http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm

Note that uranium mined from seawater is about six times as expensive as conventional uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Uranium

Indeed, which is why it's not done commercially today. Note also that total fuel cost is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant, and that includes mining, milling, enrichment, and fabrication. As seawater extraction becomes cheaper and uranium mines run low (no time soon), it will basically be a wash economically to switch to the renewable uranium. Also, breeder reactors don't need you to enrich the fuel, so that counterbalances any increased extraction cost. On the downside most (but not all) breeders require chemical reprocessing which so far has been very expensive. With development this too could go down.

The key point is that we would never run out of fuel as a species if we went big with nuclear.

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.

My estimates assume us-level consumption (10kWh/yr/person) for 10 billion people, and that will last 4 billion years. Don't think I'm too worried about exponential growth catching up to that!

Nuclear waste lasts a long time but we know how to store it for geologic time frames in crystalline bedrock or salt deposits where we have evidence that nothing will move for 200million years. And we only need 1 million until it's safe again.

If you got all your primary energy from nuclear reactors for your entire life, you'd make about 3 soda cans of waste. That's tiny compared to all the alternatives.

Projections of limited per-person energy growth have proved exceedingly unreliable.

You're right. In the 1970s people estimated continued exponential per-person growth in the USA and ordered power plants in accordance. But then demand leveled off and lots of power plant orders were canceled. It's been nowhere near exponential in developed nations for some decades and is currently not expected to return to exponential growth. Sure, teleportation could be invented and use lots of energy, though, so if that's your point, fair enough. Let me rephrase my estimate a bit then to reemphasize the magnitude of the nuclear resource:

With 10 billion people using 40,000x the current per-person USA energy usage, we could power the world for at least 100,000 years with the nuclear resource.

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...

Thanks!

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

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