Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
en't far behind, changing over to fuel oil and lining up to take advantage of the glut. Mech-
anized agriculture and manufacturing took off in Texas, now suddenly the proving ground
for the oil-based economy. Before long, the pattern was being repeated around the globe.
Navies of the world switched to oil as well, signaling the abrupt geopolitical centrality of
petroleum to the unfolding twentieth century.
And then there was the automobile, coming of age with eerie synchrony to the oil
industry's burgeoning second wave. Several energy sources had been proposed for cars,
among them electricity, but oil's new availability sealed the deal for the internal combus-
tion engine. And the Texas crude refined nicely into gasoline. Before, gasoline had been
considered a near-waste product; now it took its place next to fuel oil as the power source
of the new age. It was time to pave America, and the rest of the world.
Over the following century, finding new markets for petroleum—new uses, new
products, new
classes
of products—would prove to be one of the things that oil companies
do best. And there is a direct line from the glut of oil on Spindletop to the omnipresence
of petroleum today. As any oilman or environmentalist will tell you, oil seeps into every
corner of our lives—our households, our economy, our politics. It fuels or abets almost
everything we do, from tourism to warfare. I'm not telling you anything you don't already
know. We live on oil, and by it, and its use is responsible for more than a third of global
emissions of carbon dioxide, which, in an era of man-made climate change, is perhaps the
most fundamental pollutant of all.
On Spindletop, though, on that January morning in 1901, all that was yet to come.
Nobody knew that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be made of petroleum.
And there had never been a gusher before. Nobody knew that a well could, without warn-
ing, explode into a glistening, green-black geyser. Nobody had ever danced in oil rain-
ing from the sky. When Lucas finally saw the roaring fountain that would immortalize his
name, he just shouted, “
What is it?
”
The late afternoon is a good time to drive to Port Arthur from Houston. You'll arrive at sun-
down, under a lavender sky deepening into purple, and see the distant lights and towers of
a city, a wavering Manhattan spread out along the water, just where Texas decides it would
rather be Louisiana.
What you see is not a city. Draw closer, and what you thought were buildings resolve
into the spires and turrets of industry. They are refineries. Soon you're surrounded. In one
direction, there is water—in every other, the humming, roaring machinery of petrochemic-
al digestion, a rusty Oz that churns through a million gallons of oil every forty minutes. It
