Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

about the location’s rock salt terrain. The men formed a partnership and over the following year drilled multiple test wells with no luck, again draining their coffers. Higgins bowed out but Lucas persisted, obtaining funds from Pennsylvania-based oil investors and contributing his own limited savings—at one point even selling all his furniture to keep the project alive.

      Lucas commissioned the Hamill brothers, jovial do-it-yourself engineers from Corsicana, Texas, to construct a more powerful drill. Following his guidelines, they jury-rigged the Spindletop derrick from hand-cut lumber and powered it with a boiler fed by firewood. Lucas kept the drilling operation going for nearly a year, grinding down into the earth with this primitive drill 500 feet, then 700, then 1,300. Suddenly he struck the payload.

      At 10:30 a.m. on January 10, 1901, the dry earth began to shudder. Mud gurgled up to the mouth of the well, giving way to a thunderous blast of gas that launched hundreds of feet of thick steel pipe and hunks of bedrock into the air. Rocks the size of cannonballs rained down. The oil bed had been penetrated, and pressure from its rocks and surrounding gases had triggered the explosion. The debris was followed by oil—shooting up over the top of the derrick in a stream 150 feet high. As a crowd gathered to watch, the geyser coated the onlookers with a mist of inky, pungent liquid the consistency of corn syrup: black gold.

      The following day, the Dallas Morning News reported that the “people of Beaumont, of every sort and condition, are in a feverish state of excitement…The throng on the streets appears to be childishly happy and grown men are going about smiling and bowing to each other like school girls.” The news quickly spread to the national media. “There is wild excitement throughout Southeast Texas over the oil strike,” the New York Times proclaimed on the front page of its January 13, 1901, edition. “The well has a flow of over 18,000 barrels every twenty-four hours. It is said to be the greatest oil strike in the history of that industry.”

      The pressure within the field’s oil-bearing rocks was so intense that the well could not be capped for days, and no tools could be found to quell the current. By January 14, a headline in the Dallas Morning News read, “Want It Stopped: Reward Offered to Any One Who Will Control the Flow.” Reporters estimated that more than 60,000 barrels of oil had gone to waste, despite the fact that every vehicle in town had been mobilized to ferry buckets of crude to holding tanks. Fear spread that the petroleum-drenched soil would catch fire.

      After many sleepless nights, the Hamill brothers—the same engineers whom Lucas had originally hired to drill the well—managed to clamp an iron T-joint and pressure valve to the top of the derrick. The “weary and oil-saturated Hamills still had enough strength and sense of humor left to line up and bow to their audience,” wrote Beaumont historian and oil prospector Michel Halbouty.

      Halbouty was himself a prime example of the swashbuckling breed of wildcatter that came to be uniquely associated with Texas. A lifelong oil entrepreneur who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-five, Halbouty told me at a 2003 energy conference that the day of Spindletop’s discovery “was the day the United States became a world power.” At the time, I looked sideways at Halbouty’s claim—he was a Beaumont native, after all, and struck me as someone who might exaggerate the impact of his hometown. An exuberant man with snow-white hair and a silver handlebar mustache, Halbouty was the son of a grocer who began his oil career as a boy carting ice water to workers at Spindletop. He went on to discover dozens of oil and gas fields from Texas to Alaska, building a fortune of millions—one of thousands of Americans whose lives were changed by the Beaumont gusher.

      Soon after Spindletop was uncorked, investors, wildcatters, and thrill seekers rushed to the Texas fields from places as far away as California, Illinois, and New York. Within months, Beaumont’s population had leapt from 9,000 to 50,000, and land prices had surged by a factor of thousands. The town itself had become a forest of wooden derricks shaped like church steeples; iron drill pumps continually lifted and bowed their heads like religious supplicants. The first well drilled (known as the Lucas well) could alone produce half the total U.S. output at the time—as much oil as 37,000 eastern wells, and twice the production of Pennsylvania, the leading oil state.

      The discovery had global implications. “Within a year,” wrote one awed geologist, “Texas oil was burning in Germany, England, Cuba, Mexico, New York and Philadelphia.” By January 1902, 440 gushers had been tapped in the area.

      OIL AND TROUBLE

      “The frenzy has penetrated every mind and the blood has coursed like fire through the hearts of everyone who owned a bit of [Beaumont] land,” reported the Dallas Morning News on January 17, 1901. “The mind has been stunned with the possibilities of great wealth and men have been carried further from sound business principles than they care to admit.”

      Plenty of men struck gold at Spindletop, but many more lost their shirts. Pattillo Higgins, for one, never saw a dime of profit off the well he had discovered and in which he had invested his fortune and sweat. Even Anthony Lucas abandoned his efforts at Spindletop within two years of tapping the gusher; the investors who had funded his efforts had offered him a mere 12 percent ownership of the oil produced, and quickly bought him out.

      Like all oil boomtowns, Beaumont fell victim to land speculation, overproduction, and general disrepair. “Now every bubble of gas, every oil-coated pool in all the region is prized as a possible indication of vast oil deposits beneath,” reported the Galveston Daily News on February 3, 1901. “Consequently there is anxiety to tie up the land with leases. Prospectors are scanning the maps and running about the country in search of owners.” One farmer sold his land for $20,000 to a buyer who within minutes had turned it around to another investor for $50,000. At the height of the frenzy, the price of a single acre within Beaumont was as much as $900,000 ($22 million in today’s dollars). The disenchanted began calling the area “Swindletop.”

      Boomtowns such as Beaumont had all the chaos of a carnival, teeming with prostitution, heavy drinking, theft, and public brawls. Drilling was governed by the Rule of Capture, a British law “by which oil was regarded in legal terms like a wild animal—who ever caught it first could keep it,” wrote historian Anthony Sampson. The producer or driller was entitled to as much oil as he could extract, and had no obligation to pay community taxes or government royalties.

      Growth was haphazard, poorly planned. Trees were clear-cut from hillsides to provide wood for derricks and shack housing, the soil beneath them eroding in avalanches of mud during heavy rains. Relentless mule, wagon, and foot traffic turned dirt roads into impassable swamps. The mire had to be covered with wood planks so that roustabouts wouldn’t drown. Here’s one author’s description of a boomtown known as Oil City that captures the squalor surrounding the wildcatter’s existence:

      Oil City, with its one long crooked and bottomless street. Oil City, with its dirty houses, greasy plank sidewalks, and fathomless mud. Oil City, where horsemen ford [sic] the street in four to five feet of liquid filth, and inhabitants wear knee-boots as part of indoor equipment. Where weary travelers consider themselves blessed if they can secure their claim to six feet of floor for the night…

      Air reeks with oil. The mud is oil, the rocks hugged by the narrow street perspire oil. The water shines with rainbow hues of oil. Oil boats, loaded with oil, throng the oily stream, and oil men with oily hands fasten oily ropes around the oily snubbing posts. Oily derricks stand among the houses…and the citizens are busy boring in their back yards, in waste lots, or wherever a derrick can be erected.

      Beyond the grime and disorder of these conditions, the problem with such a reckless approach to drilling was that it inefficiently depleted underground reserves. The Spindletop field produced 3.5 million barrels of oil in 1901; the following year production soared to 17.5 million barrels; in 1903 it dipped to 8.6 million barrels. By February 1904, production was down to just 10,000 barrels a day, and the supply dried up over the next four years. “The cow was milked too hard,” Spindletop founder Anthony Lucas commented during a 1904 Beaumont visit, “and moreover she was not milked intelligently.”

      After his big discovery, Lucas had patented a long list of devices he’d developed at Spindletop, many of which are used to this day—including