The Extraction State: A History of Natural Gas in America

406 Pages·2021·27.078 MB·English

by  Charles Blanchard

THE EXTRACTION STATE

THE
EXTRACTION STATE
A History
of
Natural Gas
in
america
CHARLES BLANCHARD
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2020, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4636-6
ISBN 10: 0-8229-4636-X
Jacket design by Melissa Dias-Mandoly
Contents
Part I:
Making Use of a Useless Byproduct, 1878–1954
Chapter 1: The Smoky City 5
Chapter 2: Going Back to Smoke 17
Chapter 3: The Rise of the Power Trust 30
Chapter 4: Regulation and Rejuvenation 56
Chapter 5: Wartime Pipes and the Postwar Boom 71
Part II:
A Manufactured Shortage of Natural Gas,
1954–1992
Chapter 6: Regulation and Ruin 103
Chapter 7: Stopping a Freight Train 129
Chapter 8: The End of Abundance 151
Chapter 9: From Scarcity to Surplus 172
Chapter 10: The Gas Bubble and the End of Merchant Service 202
Part III:
A (Mostly) Free Market and Its Discontents,
1992–2020
Chapter 11: Gas Becomes a Commodity 229
Chapter 12: The Dash for Gas 261
Chapter 13: Speculation on a Galactic Scale 283
Chapter 14: Shale 298
Chapter 15: Aftermath 319
Notes 353
Bibliography 379
Index 393
vi
THE EXTRACTION STATE

Part I
Making Use of a Useless
Byproduct, 1878–1954
If you were to ask a crowd which state is the historic home of the oil and gas
industry, surely the overwhelming and emphatic response would be Texas.
You might hear Oklahoma or Louisiana as well—what I’ll refer to collec-
tively as the Southwest. And while it is true that those states became the
most important in North American oil and gas, in its early days the young
industry was centered in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and western
New York—Appalachia. It was in Appalachia, in the second half of the
1800s, where the first oil and gas wells were drilled, the first gas pipelines
were laid, and the first consumers switched from coal-derived manufac-
tured gas to natural gas.
I begin the story of the natural gas industry in the late 1870s. At this
point the Industrial Revolution had made coal an important and widely
used fuel in industry, though most people still used wood to heat their
homes and businesses. The world’s first oil boom began in northwest Penn-
sylvania in 1859, and thousands of prospectors had rushed to the region in
search of black gold, much in the same way they had rushed to California
a decade earlier in search of actual gold. The lucky struck oil. The unlucky
struck nothing. The truly unlucky struck an uncontrollable, unstorable,
and entirely unusable compound: natural gas.
3