Get unlimited digital access for 13 weeks for $13.
Severe weather alert in Monroe and Carbon counties.
October 10

Black gold and the story of us

Black gold – that's what people sometimes call crude oil. The term, actually, was first used to describe coal. Either way, it's an apt metaphor.

Oil, coal and natural gas are fossil fuels that represent the most elemental source of human wealth: energy from the sun.

For all of recorded history, up until 1859 when the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Crawford County, just about the only way for people to capture and hold onto solar energy en masse was agriculture. That's because plants posses the unique ability to turn sunlight into carbohydrates through the process of photosynthesis. Grains — wheat, corn, rice — turned out to be best-suited to our incipient civilized economy because they lend themselves to long-term storage.

And so, empires rose and fell according to the productivity of their farm fields.

The discovery of oil, however, introduced a new and very powerful source of stored solar energy. (Fossil fuel, most scientists believe, originated through photosynthesis and organic decomposition long, long ago.) Suddenly, people had access to the concentrated energy of millennia of sunlight. It was in the form hydrocarbons that burned better than firewood.

First, fossil fuel would become the food of machines — trains, tractors, cars, etc. Later it would become the food of food itself. Nitrogen fertilizer derived from petroleum is the key to the monoculture at the heart of industrial agriculture.

What's more, petroleum is endowed with nearly magical properties as a raw material. It's the main ingredient of plastic and polyester and to a less extent goes into thousands of other products, from contact lenses to food coloring.

Indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that petroleum is the main and indispensable ingredient of modern life.

Recent headlines tell us gasoline prices are on the rise this spring and motorists are complaining. Perhaps they should reflect upon what they're really burning.

—Sam Kennedy

Copyright © 2015, The Morning Call