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Beaumont, Texas - 1901:

"When it poured over the derrick floor they moved back. With each pulsation the flow went a little higher. Finally the momentum was so great that oil shot through the top of the derrick. With it came rocks and sand and shale from the conglomerate formation they had drilled into. It spurted skyward in a sream over 160 feet high - at least twice the height of the derrick. Once the oil was in full flow, there seemed to be no lessening.

After a few minutes, when their excitement had subsided somewhat, they crept closer, getting soaked with a spray of black oil. Their excitement changed to disgust. The machinery was damaged. Mud flowed all over the derrick floor. Strings of drill pipe lay on the ground, twisted and useless. They saw no way to control the power they had unleashed." ~ From: "Gusher At Spindletop" by William A. Owens, 1958. Recounting the famous Beaumont, Texas oil strike of January 1901 and the beginings of the Texas oil boom.

DarkSyde at Unscrewing the Inscrutable uncorks a very dark oily tale of his own. From Pan troglodytes to petro-politics, man, monkey business, and peak production:

In the blink of a cosmic eye, one species of ape came down out of Miocene treetops to forested Pliocene floors, and walked onto Pleistocene plains. They learned to make stone tools, usurp the kills of others, and hunt their own. They domesticated The Flame, overtook their less fortunate bipedal cousins with luck and evolution, eradicated them forever from the planet, and spread all over the globe. They soon turned their swollen brains onto domesticating the flora and fauna and focused their new found wealth on waging their wars to defend it, or steal it. They enlisted their most trusted ally, fire, to melt rocks into metal, pound metal into molds, contrive massive mechanical devices belching black smoke driven by fire's generous sibling, heat, and learned to turn the wheels of industry powered with the fluids and condensates from putrefied bacterial mats. Armed with these inventions, the gibbering self aggrandizing hominids, glibly slaughtered ever-greater numbers as each respective herd proclaimed themselves the pinnacle of creation, unaware or uncaring that the beasts created from their own Id now on the prowl was tracking them all. The newest camouflaged predator padding silently behind them through their metal and concrete rain forests is no mere ice age mega-predator stalking nomadic Paleolithic apes intent on filling it's belly with the tender meat of talking chimpanzees. It is a monster of their own making and one they're nurturing with reckless, unstoppable, abandon.

Consumptus vampirik:

We use oil because it is by far the cheapest and most convenient form of stored energy many times over... and production is peaking while consumption climbs. The consensus among those in the Petrology Community is that global oil production will peak within five years or so, maybe less, while world oil consumption, fueled largely by the insatiable US addiction and the burgeoning economies in Asia-India, continues to grow steadily. Production Vs consumption. Those lines will cross next year. What happens then?

Find out. Continue reading A Midwinter Night's Mare, December 22, 2004. BTW: this post by DS not only contains a whole array of interesting information but it's framed in the context of a apocalyptic nightmare. Which, IMHO, makes for one rollicking good hellborn read.

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