[Apologies for posting this a day behind schedule.] Light sweet crude oil (above) means a thin, low-sulfur, unrefined oil, and at one time the global price was set here in western Pennsylvania, where it was found in 1859 at 70’ in a lucky strike by Edwin Drake. Of course, the Seneca had already discovered the oil where it seeped into Oil Creek, and they had long used it for various purposes, including as Vaseline, but Drake built a well to extract oil as fast as it could be pumped out. His backers already knew of many commercial uses, including replacing whale oil which was used for lamps. The industry helped the Union win the Civil War. Quaker State and Pennzoil were born near here, and John D. Rockefeller was an early customer. Ida Tarbell, daughter of a local independent forced out by the monopoly, went on to write a critical history of Standard Oil.

The hub of the heritage area, the Drake Well Museum has a variety of equipment over 100 years old and many exhibits explaining the different oil products produced by refining at different temperatures and occasional demonstrations of (recycled) oil pumped up by the reconstructed historic well below. If you want to learn the story, you can look up the 1954 Vincent Price movie about “Colonel” Drake on YouTube; it was made by the American Petroleum Institute. With Halloween almost upon us, nothing could be more appropriate than watching a movie about the oil industry starring an actor famous for horror movies.

No matter how cleanly carbon is burned, it is still dangerous, as running a car inside a garage proves. In only 165 years, we extracted and burned millions of years of accumulated oil, and we changed the composition of our atmosphere. Carbon levels have risen at an incredibly fast rate back to where they were about 3 million years ago, ten times as long ago as when human Homo sapiens (wise) evolved. Considering the mass extinctions our carbon burning will cause and our inexcusable refusal to stop, we should probably rename ourselves Homo stultus (foolish).