A brief human history of fossil fuels
Having established that fossil fuels have been around on this planet a lot longer than we have, let’s look at a timeframe that’s a bit easier to grasp - our own history with fossil fuels.
You may have thought, as I did, that humans only began using fossil fuels at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. However, there is evidence that we had been using them for a lot longer. Ancient Greek scientist Theophrastus referenced coal in his geological treatise On Stones, evidence of its use has been found in artefacts dating back to Roman Britain, and Marco Polo witnessed the burning of coal on his travels to China in the thirteenth century. In fact, around the same time as Marco Polo was in China, King Edward I of England was attempting to ban his subjects from burning coal for fuel due to the amount of smoke it produced. However the ban was largely ignored and the law became redundant. Similarly, there is evidence that oil was used in the ancient Babylonian and Chinese civilizations. Natural gas was not as well understood, however it is thought crude bamboo pipelines were constructed around 400BC in China to transport gas and use it to extract salt from water by heating it.
It was the Industrial Revolution that marked our use of fossil fuels at scale. Coal was initially the most important fossil fuel, as it powered the steam engine. James Watt’s improvements to the design of steam engines in 1776 meant they took over from water wheels as the main source of power for machinery than enabled mass production for the first time. Coal also became an essential fuel for transportation as steamships and steam-powered trains became widespread. Nowadays, coal is used to generate electricity, and to produce steel, aluminium and concrete.
In 1847 Scottish chemist James Young's attention was drawn to oil seeping from the ground near a coal mine in Derbyshire. From this crude oil he was able to distil a light thin oil suitable for use as lamp oil and a thicker oil suitable for lubricating machinery. Just a few years later in modern-day Poland Ignacy Łukasiewicz invented the modern kerosene lamp and constructed the world’s first modern oil well. Łukasiewicz was said to have remarked:
“This liquid is the future wealth of the country, it’s the wellbeing and prosperity of its inhabitants, it’s a new source of income for the poor, and a new branch of industry which shall bear plentiful fruit.”
Arguably though, the modern oil industry was born in 1859 along the banks of the aptly named Oil Creek in Pennsylvania. There, Edwin Drake, working for the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, drilled a well using a steam engine, a touched off the Pennsylvania oil rush. Although Drake failed to patent his method for oil drilling and died virtually penniless, the Drake Well Museum stands to this day as testament to his accomplishment.
By Niagara - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21009058
The oil industry was transformed again in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the internal combustion engine, and in particular an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine using gasoline as German engineer Carl Benz invented in 1885. The success of Henry Ford’s mass produced cars meant that by the 1950s oil had outstripped coal as the most used energy source in the United States. The supply of petroleum was so lucrative that the founder of Standard Oil (which at times controlled 80 per cent of the supply of petroleum), John D. Rockefeller, had a net worth equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the entire US economy, making him the wealthiest individual ever. Oil continues to be a major source of fuel for transportation, including for planes and ships, but is also used to make plastic and other synthetic materials - meaning it is everywhere, as shown in this infographic.
Natural gas only took off as an energy source in its own right in the late 1920s, when pipeline technology had developed sufficiently that gas could be transported long distances. It became favoured for heating and cooking in homes due to its relatively clean combustion and as a result even larger pipelines were developed to distribute gas across Europe, North America and the Middle East. Aside from domestic use, natural gas is also used to generate electricity and is also an important component in the production of ammonia, which is used to make fertiliser.
As you can see, fossil fuels power the Industrial Revolution as it began and in many ways continue to do so today. The ways in which they are used have also diversified significantly since coal was used to power the steam engine. As a result fossil fuels are firmly embedded in all our lives and a transition away from them will take work, but it can be done.