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Oil in the age of steam*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2010

Nuno Luís Madureira
Nuno Luís Madureira
Affiliation:
ISCTE cacifo 321 B, Av Forças Armadas, 1600 Lisbon, Portugal E-mail: nuno.madureira@iscte.pt
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Abstract

This article explains how oil as an energy carrier evolved alongside the technology of the steam engine. In practical terms, fuel oil was adapted to machines that were originally devised to be coal-fuelled and this led to the flexible switchover between energy carriers. The article links the micro account of technological developments with the macro records of energy consumption, to reveal how steam technology set the stage for the commoditization of oil, the customary fuel of the internal combustion engine. The analysis of the oil–steam combine embraces its diffusion across leading producing nations such as Russia and the United States, the diffusion in industrial and transport activities in South America, and the diffusion throughout European navies. What was at stake was the transformation of oil into a geostrategic good and the triggering of an international race for the seizure of fossil fuels.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 75 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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24 Williamson and Daum, American petroleum industry, vol. 2, p. 39, table 2.11, showing the mean crude oil prices by field for 1900–10.

25 George W. Melville, Report of the U.S. Naval Liquid Fuel Board, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904, p. 431.

26 Fuel oil regulations for ships are summarized in F. B. Dunn, Industrial uses of fuel oil, San Francisco, CA: Technical Publishing Company, 1916. pp. 157–63; fuel oil regulations for railways are described in Eugene McAuliffe, Railway fuel: the coal problem in its relation to the transportation and use of coal and coal substitutes by steam railroads, New York: Simmons Boardman, 1927.

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30 Tolf, Russian Rockfellers, pp. 70–1.

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36 Snyder, ‘Petroleum’, pp. 133–44.

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42 Estimates for a 34-day round trip between New York and Antwerp in 1924–25 by a 9000–ton steamer, using oil burning with steam atomization. Based on ‘Growth of world’s bunkering ports’; C. Hardy, Oil ships and sea transport, London: George Routledge and Son, 1931, pp. 144–6; Dunn, Industrial uses, p. 158.

43 Dunn, Industrial uses, p. 6.

44 Brian R. Sullivan, ‘Italian warship construction and maritime strategy, 1873–1915’, in Phillips O’Brien, ed., Technology and naval combat in the twentieth century and beyond, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2001, pp. 3–21. Russia was nevertheless the first navy in the world to adapt a whole fleet (its Caspian fleet) to fuel oil, in 1882, more because of the easy access to fuel oil than a focus on speed.

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51 Lautenschlager, ‘Technology’, pp. 19–20.

52 Quoted in C. W. Barron, ‘Oil expansion of peace to outstrip war demands’, Wall Street Journal, 17 May 1917, p. 3.

53 Keith Neilson, ‘Reinforcements and supplies from overseas: British strategic sealift in the First World War’, in Greg Kennedy, ed., The merchant marine in international affairs, 1850–1950, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000, pp. 31–57; Orest Babij, ‘The Royal Navy and the interwar plans for war against Japan: the problem of oil supply’, in Kennedy, Merchant marine, pp. 84–107.

54 Nicholas A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s naval revolution, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; John H. Maurer, ed., Churchill and strategic dilemmas before the World Wars, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003. For an econometric evaluation of how the building programme of the Royal Navy was politically internally driven as opposed to driven by foreign threats, see Richard J. Stoll, ‘Steaming in the dark? Rules, rivals and the British Navy, 1860–1913’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36, 2, 1992, pp. 262–83.

55 The British position generated larger repercussions in the context of a shift in United States international policy that brought the federal government towards a more active position. The idea that the country was running out of oil compelled the government to secure international sources of supply. See John G. Clark, Energy and the federal government: fossil fuel policies, 1900–1946, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987; Edward W. Chester, United States oil policy and diplomacy: a twentieth-century overview, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.

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61 NICB, Oil conservation, pp. 63–5, 76. The weight of fuel oil imports in total oil imports is a distinctive trait of the Chilean pattern of energy usage. See Marcelo Bucheli, ‘Multinational corporations, business groups, and economic nationalism: Standard Oil, Royal Dutch-Shell, and energy politics in Chile’, paper presented at the Business History Workshop, Harvard University, 10 November 2008, pp. 41–2.

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