Dear reader, you’re with me in the grind now. My intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.
Things have been tough since October 7th, as we stand witness to a holocaust in Palestine. I’ve been processing the horror with my family and reading through Zionism in the Age of Dictators by Lenni Brenner, which I hope you will look at especially if, like me, you are Jewish or have previously fallen into the specious “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” trope. We must stay awake; we must demand a ceasefire, but when it comes, we must not rest a day before we demand urgently an end to the blockade and the right to return for all. As horrific as the last month has been, the movement for a free Palestine is stronger now than it has been in my lifetime; I hope this will be remembered as a turning point.
But I do want to get back to the Autonomous Corpse Juice Project, and I had this section typed in before the war. All facts that are uncited come from The Extraction State by Charles Blanchard, which is not as radical as its title implies; Blanchard is a financial analyst with expertise in gas. But a good overview nonetheless.
The first conquest of the dead god was of the night. Throughout the somatic energy regime, fire persisted alongside animals as a constant companion and survival tool. Heat and light. For light, people burned candles and oil, whatever vegetable oil was on hand. Then there was whale oil, the fuel that was made obsolete by gas light.
The gas light was invented by David Melville in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1805. Specifically, Melville developed the process by which coked coal could be turned into a flammable gas that then could be fed into a lamp. He successfully lit his home and the tavern next-door with burners connected to a small network of gaslines. He formed a company and tried to get municipal contracts, then the whaling industry got wind of his activities in their own home territory of the Northeastern seaboard, and waged a bribery and propaganda campaign to shut him down.1 The Melville clan is large and has a well documented genealogy that says that Herman and David were not related. Yet it is impossible to say that they are entirely unrelated, if only by cultural circumstance and history’s sense of irony.
Nonetheless, ten years later the cities began to get gas light. People loved it, and at first paid admission to see gas lights burning, which is how Rembrandt Peale, a museum owner, started the first successful gas company which lit Baltimore first in 1816. Then the gas industry first hit the big time in New York, where “men of standing and means”2 Samuel Leggett, president of Franklin Bank, and twelve associates owned the New York Gas Light Company, which built a gas grid in lower Manhattan that was ignited in 1823. Chicago got it 1850, San Francisco in 1854, and almost every American city had it by the early 1870s.
The methane burned in those gas lights was obtained by heating coal in the absence of oxygen, which produces coke oven gas that was about half and half, hydrogen and methane, along with plenty of contaminants. Coke oven gas was also called “manufactured gas,” to differentiate it from “natural gas.” That process of manufacturing coke oven gas was horribly unhealthy and done locally, and so it was a major contributor to the famous toxic fogs that plagued both American and English cities at the end of the 19th century. However, at its founding, The New York Gas Company faced a shortage of coal, since the coal deposits of Appalachia would not be tapped until the 1840s, and so they developed an apparatus for making flammable gas from crude oil.
The Haymaker boys, Obadiah and Michael, were out looking for oil (already a very popular commodity) when they popped their gas well on November 3, 1878. Almost immediate, an onlooker ignited it with a lantern, and it became a “flaming fire, issuing from the earth [that] could be seen at night at a distance of eight or ten miles, and its roaring sound was distinctly heard for five or six miles.” (Blanchard). The Haymaker burned millions of cubic feet every day. Eventually, the gas was brought under control, but its ownership was contested. In 1882, an unnamed “promoter from Chicago” tried to buy the well from the Haymaker boys for $20,000 cash. But at the same time, one of the boys’ investors, H.J. Brunot, made a deal to sell the whole operation to Joseph Pew and his partner, Edward Octavius Emerson, cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Promoter from Chicago arrived at the well with fifty armed men on November 26, 1883. The Haymaker boys showed up with a posse of ten. Obadiah Haymaker was bayonetted four times and died before reaching home. Absent that day were Pew and Edward Octavius, but they cleanly won in the courts and became the uncontested owners of the Haymaker well. They incorporated the Peoples Natural Gas Company and built a pipeline to send the gas to Pittsburgh, which was completed in January 1883. That city was famously polluted at the time. It lived under a constant haze emitted by the steel energy. But it got noticeably better when the city got Haymaker gas, for seven years. After that, the well was exhausted and the city back to manufactured gas. Pew and Edward Octavius Emerson renamed their company into the Sun Oil Company, which, by 1985 was still the 20th largest company in the United States. That was when it pioneered the use of horizontal drilling in the Austin Chalk field, ushering in the Fracking Age.
There began a century-long battle over the flammable gas regulatory regime. The logic of gas, especially of public gas lights, dictates action at the municipal level. Cities came to need a grid of pipelines, which were built at public expense and outside of the War economy. Therefore, gas needed to be controlled by a utility compact, rather than regulated as a pure commodity like oil. Gas companies needed to have some close relationship to the State, which proposed in exchange to grant them a monopoly in their market. However, when cities made the switch from manufactured gas to natural gas, there became three different types of gas companies—utilities, pipelines, and producers—where before there were only the utilities, who manufactured and distributed coke oven gas.
Before that could happen, someone had to build all the pipelines at a significant capital investment. You can move oil by many means, but you can only move gas through a pipeline. Pipeline companies were formed and they determined the shape of the natural gas cashflow. At first, before the War, it wasn’t a priority and, since it was a utility compact, there little exciting profit in it. But during World War II, a private company was founded with public money, War Emergency Pipelines, and they built two pipelines, Big Inch from the crude oilfields in East Texas, and Little Inch from the refineries in Beaumont, Texas, where the pedophile and race terrorist Patillo Higgins still lived, to the East Coast, from whence it was shipped to the War.
Immediately after the War the cities in the Northeastern part of the country were split evenly between consumers of natural gas and manufactured gas. Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston had no access to natural gas. Then, Big Inch and Little Inch were bought by E(lijah) Holley Poe’s company, TETCO, and converted into gaslines. Continuing with the theme, given that Edgar Allan Poe’s best friend’s middle name was Holley it seems likely that TETCO’s boss was related to Master of American Horror, or at least thought of himself as such.3 These transregional pipelines faced competition from the Tennessee Gas Pipeline, run by a “loudmouthed bully” ( Blanchard) named Gardiner Symonds, and from United Gas, run by Norris McGowen. These three inaugurated an age of public corruption as they bribed municipal utilities in cities like New York and Boston. Meanwhile, PG&E in California contracted with Paul Kayser’s El Paso Natural Gas out of Texas.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that natural gas producers—not just municipal distributors—could be regulated by the Federal Power Commission (FPC) under the Natural Gas Act of 1938 as long as their pipelines crossed state lines. This created two potentially divergent streams of gas capital—intrastate regulated gas and interstate unregulated gas. Since the gas market was sleepy and uneventful, and since gas was so naturally abundant in the US, the two prices remained aligned until 1973, where we will pick up next time.
Louis Stotz and Alexander Jamison, History of the Gas Industry, 1938.
Stotz and Jamison.
So to summarize, we’ve got Melville, Emerson, and Poe all involved in the gas industry. What does this say about American letters? That it arose exclusively from a white, aristocratic, capitalist class and therefore was dependent upon petrocaptialism for its very existence.