Drake Well

So entities like Standard Oil and these other companies, they figured out how to build long-distance pipelines to get more prolific natural gas fields in, say, northern West Virginia to get their production sort of piped up to the Pittsburgh region.

That energy, whether it was coal or natural gas with the oil industry, which also started in Pennsylvania with, uh, w- with Drake, Colonel Drake Well up in Oil City just to the north of Pittsburgh.

All that stuff fed those downstream industries, right? So it powered the railroad industry.

It created freight for the railroad industry, which then spun its web across America.

In 1859, the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania.

This was called the Drake Well, and he used a six horsepower, uh, little steam engine with a little boiler, and basically just used that engine to help drive a pipe into the ground to a, to a depth of about 20 meters.

Um, if they ran that six horsepower engine for about a year, they would need to extract about 20 barrels of oil during that year in order to use the same amount of energy that that engine required.

Um, but in fact, they were able to produce about 20 barrels per day, and so this was the first commercial well because they produced 365 times the energy they needed, uh, to actually run that drill.