In fact, the timing of peak oil may soon become irrelevant. Political and environmental forces could end our oil addiction long before supplies run dry. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” as Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a former oil minister to Saudi Arabia, famously said, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”
The drilling technology itself may become too costly, for one thing. As the supergiant oil fields dwindle, we are getting our supplies from an ever greater number of smaller fields. “We’ve had to drill more and more wells to keep production steady,” Matthew Simmons told me. Much of the current stock of drilling equipment is aging and in need of replacement.
There are, furthermore, external costs to America’s oil dependence that could hobble the industry well before oil reserves vanish. The military costs of defending our petroleum interests abroad are tremendous—and growing. Just to keep U.S. forces on the ground worldwide to protect the country’s energy supplies costs U.S. taxpayers some $100 billion a year, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit organization that analyzes federal data.
Likewise, the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels are becoming increasingly costly. In the state of California alone, “$2.5 trillion of real estate assets are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise and wildfires expected to result from climate change over the course of a century,” according to a recent report from the University of California, Berkeley. Add to that the growing impact of warming trends on the state’s and the nation’s water supplies, road and transportation networks, tourism industries, agriculture, and public health.
In the coming decades, the double whammy of climate change and military spending could sufficiently drive up the price of petroleum to make green alternatives such as electric cars and wind power look increasingly attractive and affordable—pushing petroleum out of the market long before supplies run out.
Siegele brushed aside such concerns, stating matter-of-factly that the game of oil diplomacy has been running for the better part of a century, and the United States has gotten out of military predicaments far thornier than those it faces today. As for global warming, he believes technology will triumph here, too: we’ll find a way to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, making fossil fuels climate-friendly.
Just as we can’t be certain how much oil is left, it’s also too early to predict what new technology breakthroughs will win out in the long run. We can be certain about some things, though. Looking back at history, it is clear that the U.S. oil industry is in a drastically different place today than when it was born just a century ago, when great pools of petroleum bubbled up unbidden from Pennsylvania streams, Oklahoma prairies, and Texas’s Golden Triangle. When lucky prospectors could just about pop a straw in the ground and release a gusher. I knew about this golden era only from the mythic heroes it spawned—like Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, sitcom’s fluky Appalachian mountaineer who struck oil with a stray hunting bullet and made instant millions; Jett Rink, James Dean’s character in the movie Giant, the down-and-out ranch hand who stepped on a patch of soft Texas soil, saw glistening black fluid pool in his footprint, and became a prodigal oil tycoon; and Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis in 2008’s There Will Be Blood, who built a petroleum empire from a ramshackle California ranch he’d bought for pocket change.
After my trip to the Cajun Express, I felt the need for more than a fictional knowledge of the glory days of American oil. I would never fully understand the work of Paul Siegele and his fellow petroleum hunters—or the magnitude of the challenges they face—without exploring the roots of their industry and the combination of luck, gumption, and sheer geological abundance that created it. How, I wanted to know, did it come to this—to scenarios as remote and arduous as ultradeep drilling? How did a resource that is now so hard to come by in America become the basis of our economic survival?
BLACK GOLD RUSH
A 60-foot-tall pink granite obelisk fringed by manicured grass and tubs of red geraniums rises up from the town square of Beaumont, Texas, population 110,000. Its inscription reads: “On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century, a new era in civilization began.” The day was January 10, 1901, and the spot—until then a scrubby knoll known as Spindletop—yielded a mammoth gusher that tripled U.S. oil production overnight. It was because of this one gusher, some historians have argued, that petroleum became the dominant fuel of the twentieth century.
In reality, as I learned from the history books I scoured at my local library, oil prospecting had begun well before the find at Spindletop—in the mid-1800s, when the petroleum by-product kerosene was discovered as an illuminant that burned brighter, cleaner, longer, and more safely than whale oil, and was far cheaper to produce. “It is the light of the age,” read an advertisement written in 1860, just months after Edwin Drake tapped America’s first oil field in Titusville, Pennsylvania. “Its light is no moonshine, but something nearer to the clear, strong, brilliant light of day, to which darkness is no party.”
Instantly, demand for the lantern fuel began to escalate. Droves of zealous prospectors began digging wells and sinking shafts throughout Pennsylvania—wells that came to be known as wildcat wells (and those who dug them as wildcatters) after a term for speculative ventures that originated in the early 1800s. The moniker was particularly apt in this case because of the bobcats and mountain lions that roared around prospectors at night in the dense Pennsylvania woods. It stuck as shorthand for any exploratory well in previously untapped terrain as prospectors expanded their efforts into West Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Public demand for the new lantern fuel soared—not just in the United States but throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia. One man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over those ballooning markets. His mission, as author Daniel Yergin described it, was to deliver “the gift of ‘new light’ to the world of darkness”—a gift that, for the moment, was supplied exclusively by oil wells in the American Northeast.
But the oil game changed radically in 1901. For years, leading geologists had insisted that no petroleum could be found at Spindletop. Two rogue wildcatters disagreed—Anthony Lucas, a salt miner from Louisiana, and Pattillo Higgins, a local mechanic and amateur geologist. Higgins was the willful son of a gunsmith; at the age of seventeen he lost his left arm in a shootout with a sheriff. A self-starter, Higgins tried running logging and brickmaking businesses before he taught himself petroleum geology from secondhand textbooks and fell in love with oil. Lucas was a Croatian immigrant with a degree in mechanical engineering. Handsome and stout, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes, he mined gold and salt in Colorado and Louisiana, where he developed a theory that salt deposits could be indicators of big oil fields lying deep below.
As early as the eighteenth century, scientists had theorized that petroleum and other fossil fuels (including coal and natural gas) originated, as Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov wrote in the mid-1700s, from “tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform.” These “tiny bodies” were predominantly of marine plankton: both Lucas and Higgins were ahead of the curve in connecting salt deposits with the contours of former seas and the precious buried residue of marine life.
The idea to drill at Spindletop first came to Higgins when he took his Baptist Sunday school class on a picnic to Spindletop Hill—a bleak plateau thick with rock salt on the edge of the sleepy rice mill town of Beaumont. It was a strange spot for lunch: pools of foul-smelling water and sulfurous gases oozed from the land, and wild bulls were known to wander the hills. But Higgins knew the place from his geology studies and had a trick up his sleeve: he jabbed his cane into the ground, and as the sulfurous vapor escaped he struck a match, creating an instantaneous bloom of fire that dazzled the kids.
Convinced that oil lay beneath the gas seep, Higgins subsequently tried to sink the first exploratory well himself in 1896 but