On the death of an industry

The other morning I jogged past this figurehead from the whaling ship RIchard Mitchell. In her 20-year career, she brought back almost 10,000 barrels of whale oil. Think of the costs of producing that oil… Build a ship, hire crews, sail around braving many dangers… Not to mention the karmic costs of hunting whales nearly to the point of extinction. Despite all that, great fortunes were made from those barrels.

But along comes petroleum. The McClintock #1 well outside Titusville, PA (billed as the oldest continuously producing oil well) produced 175 barrels a day at its height, but then settled down to a steady 50 or so. At that rate, it produced as much as the RIchard Mitchell in about half a year. Operating essentially automatically.

And that’s just one well. Today, we have about 600,000 producing wells in the US alone, most of them a lot bigger than McClintock #1. Smelly, difficult whale oil didn’t stand a chance.

An update: it was pointed out to me that a barrel of crude wasn’t quite the same as a barrel of whale oil. Whale oil was mostly used in lamps, like kerosene, and most of what comes out of oil ain’t kerosene. So, an oil well was only 50 times more enticing than whale oil, not 500. Or maybe the numbers are 20 and 200, doesn’t matter: oil’s magic not only killed whaling but spawned THE ENTIRE MODERN WORLD…