The Coming of Coal

by Robert W. Bruère

“Drilling an oil well is commonly done by means of a heavy string of tools, suspended at the end of a cable and given a churning motion by a walking beam rocked by a steam engine…. The steel tools, falling under their own weight, literally punch their way to the depth desired.”

The usual custom is for four men working two twelve-hour shifts to sink a well. Their work is to keep the engine that operates the drill running, to watch the operation, and to stoke the engine. The only danger is when the time has come to “shoot” the well. This is done only if the oil does not flow naturally when the oil-bearing strata are reached. The “shooting” consists in dropping a “go devil” upon canisters of nitroglycerine to blow out a cavity at the bottom in which oil may collect. If the charge explodes before it reaches the bottom of the well, it may blow back and wreck the derrick, and the timbers and “bull-wheel” may fall upon the men. This danger, which can be obviated by the simple process of the men going away until after the charge has exploded, is practically the only one connected with drilling for petroleum, except for the incidental danger which all handling of high explosives necessarily involves.

A well costs only about one-tenth as much per foot of descent as a mine shaft; and it can be put down in much quicker time. When it is once in contact with the oil, operating expenses are trifling, for in many cases the oil reaches the surface under natural gas pressure, and in others it has merely to be pumped. There are not the expenses for breaking rock, timbering, or haulage, which are common in coal mining.

So that in addition to being a better fuel than coal to burn under a steam boiler, petroleum mining is as healthful and safe an occupation as can be well found in contrast with the extremely dangerous work of the coal miner, and it can be far more quickly and more cheaply got out of the ground.

It has other advantages.

Coal, bituminous coal especially, is so bulky and so liable to spontaneous combustion that it is difficult to store. Petroleum, on the contrary, can be easily and satisfactorily stored in iron tanks which, standing about like great cheese boxes, are characteristic of the oil-producing country. Added to the advantage of easy storage is the much greater one of easy transportation. Unlike coal, the crude petroleum supply of the country makes no demand upon the railroads. Only under exceptional circumstances and for short distances is it hauled about in tank cars. It has its own independent system of pipe lines, after the manner of a great water supply. These systems connect the oil wells with the refineries, the markets, and the seaports.

The pipe lines are ample to distribute the current production of oil. It is these pipe lines that have not only made the petroleum industry absolutely independent of the railroads, but through the low cost of their operation have lowered the cost of petroleum products. They have also made it possible to establish oil refineries near the points of consumption and have united widely separated fields.

For all these reasons—because it is a more efficient fuel under steam boilers; because it can be produced more cheaply; because the work of mining it is easy and the danger is slight; and because having an independent transportation system of its own it makes no demand on the already overburdened railroads—petroleum might have superseded coal as the power that rules industry if there had been enough of it. Even as it is, petroleum has been able to meet a large part of the demand for fuel and so stand between the coal industry and the reorganization hanging over it.

But we have been, if possible, more prodigal in our exploitation of our petroleum resources than of coal. There was an immediate market for all the petroleum that could be produced. The well-owner's chief anxiety was lest his neighbor, whose well tapped the same underground reservoir, should get the oil out before he did. So the exploiters of petroleum rushed on their quarry with an avidity never equalled by the exploiters of coal. While approximately one-half of the coal has been left in the ground through the eagerness of the owners to beat each other to market, from seventy to ninety per cent of the petroleum in the various fields has been lost from the same cause. And industry has seemed to take it for granted that because petroleum was being produced so rapidly, there was an unlimited supply. In 1916, many plants shifted from coal to fuel oil, because of the inability of the railroads to deliver coal. We have developed an oil-burning navy and are rapidly developing an oil-burning merchant marine. Ships and factory furnaces are competing with the internal-combustion engines of millions of automobiles and the hungry lamps of the countryside for the diminishing reserves of petroleum. Already the supply of crude petroleum is hard pressed by the demand for fuel oil. Already approximately one-half of the original petroleum supply of the United States is gone. In 1918, 460,721,000 barrels were taken, while it was estimated that 6,730,000,000 barrels remained in the ground, and the production during the two subsequent years was approximately 400,000,000 barrels annually. The petroleum reserve, converting barrels into tons, amounts to only ²⁄₁₀₀₀ of our reserves of coal. If we stopped mining coal tomorrow and let American petroleum take its place, all our petroleum resources would be exhausted in about fifteen months.

And even if the supply of petroleum were far less limited than the experts estimate it to be, even if there were enough of it to last for many decades to come, the fact that it is practically the one lubricant of the industrial world makes it a social crime to burn it as a substitute for coal. Without it, every railroad wheel would run hot and stop; the great turbines in our ships and modern power plants move on bearings that are smothered in petroleum oil. And for petroleum as a lubricant there is no commercially available substitute.