Edwin L. (Colonel) Drake, hired by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company that was formed by the original investors, found the answer. He was hired to adapt the methods of salt drilling, invented by the Chinese, to drill for oil. On August 27, 1859—just when the investors’ money was completely gone and the order had been given to halt drilling—barrels of oil were pumped from the well, giv­ing new life and money to the venture. Finally, in 1861, “drillers struck the first flowing well, which gushed at the astonishing rate of three thousand barrels per day. When the oil from that well shot into the air, something ignited the escaping gases, setting off a great explosion and creating a wall of fire that killed nineteen people and blazed on for three days” (3).1

The oil was refined into kerosene for lamps, and natural gas that came out of wells with the oil was also used for lighting. These two discoveries transformed the way of life. People could now afford to have better lighting long after dark to read and work, and street lamps lit up the towns. Of course, lighting was just the beginning of the uses for oil. With the development of the internal combustion engine and automobiles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the race was on for finding new sources of oil, and the rest is history. Finally, King Coal had met its match.

Thomas Alva Edison, the brilliant American inventor, wanted to find an alter­native to kerosene and natural gas for illumination. He was well aware of the fundamental theoretical discoveries in electricity and magnetism made by James Clerk Maxwell in the middle of the nineteenth century, so Edison began working on electric illumination in 1877; within two years he had developed the incandes­cent light bulb. Because he was a businessman as well as an inventor, he wanted to commercialize the light bulb; in the process, he developed the electrical genera­tion industry. “In 1882, standing in the office of his banker, J. P. Morgan, Edison threw a switch, starting the generating plant and opening the door not only on a new industry but on an innovation that would transform the world” (3). Coal then became the primary source of energy for producing electricity.

In the twentieth century, electricity was used for far more than lighting, with the development of electric motors and all the modern appliances and electronics that people in developed countries depend on. As recognition of its importance to human societies, in 2003 the National Academy of Engineering named electrifica­tion as the most important engineering accomplishment of the twentieth century (4). But this flexible and powerful form of energy depended greatly on coal for its production, ensuring that King Coal was not going away anytime soon.

This brief sketch of energy development is fundamentally a story about the dis­covery and use of ever more concentrated and portable forms of energy. The energy density of fuel is the quantity of fuel used to produce a given amount of energy, such as a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity.2 Burning 1 kg (2.2 lb.) of firewood generates 1 kWh, 1 kg of hard coal generates 3 kWh, 1 kg of crude oil generates 4 kWh, and 1 kg of natural gas generates 5 kWh of electricity (5, 6). It is much easier to transport and store coal—with three times the energy content.

The other important part of the story is that all of these sources of energy are ulti­mately solar energy because wood, coal, oil, and natural gas obtained their original energy from the process of photosynthesis, converting the energy of the sun into hydrocarbons. Coal and oil come from remarkably lush plants that covered large parts of the earth in the Carboniferous (coal-forming) period, roughly from 360 to 300 million years ago, long before the time of the dinosaurs (7). Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were much higher in the Devonian period prior to the Carboniferous period, and much of that CO2 went into the growth of trees and plants. Because much of the world was lowland swamps during this period, when trees and plants died they were buried under anaerobic conditions that did not allow normal decay processes to recycle the carbon (2). Over millions of years, huge amounts of carbon were buried and then compressed under layers of new rock through geological times, finally becoming coal or oil. As modern society digs or pumps up these stores of carbon and burns increasing amounts of these fuels, we are returning the CO2 to the atmosphere, causing global climate change, as described in Chapter 1.