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BY DOUG HUGHEYFor the past four years, theU.S. has experienced a boom innatural gas exploration, due inpart to advancements in techniquesallowing drillers toburrow sideways throughrelatively narrow layers of rockthousands of feet below thesurface. Coupled with a processknown as hydraulic fracturing,which employs massive amountsof pressurized sand, water, andchemicals to break apart rocklayers, drillers have recoveredcopious quantities of naturalgas; so much now that methanerivals coal as the country’sprimary energy source.As methane prices haveplummeted, however, drillershave started focusing on areaslike southwestern Pennsylvania,where valuable pentanes withprices tied to oil, such aspropane, butane, and ethane,intermix with methane. Processed,these pentanes can beused to produce consumerproducts from plastics to tires.A hundred years ago, oil speculators descending on parts of Robinsonand Moon townships were also searching for the raw building blocks forconsumer products, at that time being demanded by markets arising fromthe industrial revolution.Decades before the advent of the Model T, when a byproduct ofpetroleum distillation known as gasoline was dumped in rivers, most ofthe oil produced in Pennsylvania was being sold as kerosene to marketsas far away as Europe and Russia. Packed with hydrogen-based paraffins,and low in impurities, Pennsylvania crude was suited to a range ofproducts, and from it companies made everything from bubblegum tomachine lubricants. Some Pennsylvania-based motor oil companies stilldeal largely if not exclusively in oil being produced by century-old wellslike those populating the area today.By the time oil wells were being drilled on farms lying along presentdaySteubenville Pike, a feverish, decades-old oil boom had alreadyswept across western Pennsylvania. In the wake of that boom, geologistswith the United States Geological Survey were beginning to warnthat the state’s reserves had become tenuous, fueling a new breed ofmuckraking journalists in New York who decried the nation’s growingdependence on a limited natural resource controlled by a consolidatedsphere of wealth. It was a characterization of the early petroleumindustry, formulated largely by criticism of the monopolizing operationsof John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in western Pennsylvania, that
PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER ROLINSONABOVE AND LEFT: You see them in unexpected places, and in some cases, they sit alongside the road as you drive by them. They’reoil wells, and they represent remnants of a time in western Pennsylvania history when the oil boom defined how some of this areasecured its place in history due to the economic boom the oil wells brought. Many of the local wells still put out oil, and are owned byindividuals who tap their reserves regularly. These photos around the airport area communities were taken by photographer ChristopherRolinson, a photography professor at Point Park University and owner of StartPoint Media. Can you identify where they are?
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