The only problem was finding the petroleum.Įnter Drake, who was hired by Seneca Oil Company to investigate suspected oil deposits in and around Titusville in the spring of 1858.Īfter a year-and-a-half of digging with no luck, and dwindling resources, Drake and his team came to work on the morning of Aug. What worked better, energy producers discovered, was using the existing kerosene-distilling infrastructure to convert liquid petroleum into kerosene. Through the mid-1850s, the East Coast was in desperate need of a cheap lighting source, and while kerosene distilled from coal was effective, it took work to make liquid kerosene from lumps of Appalachian coal. Edwin Drake, as introductory letters referred to him at the time, moved to Titusville from Greene County, N.Y. It happened along the aptly named Oil Creek in Cherrytree Township in Venango County, when Col. The United States’ oil and natural gas industry got its start in the Keystone State in 1859 near Titusville in Crawford County. In fact, the state’s Gross Domestic Product from utilities was $282.60 billion in 2019, which includes services such as natural gas and electricity generation, according to Trading Economics, an online platform that provides historical economic data as well as forecasts. The state was at one time the country’s leading producer in the oil and gas industry, creating thousands of jobs across the commonwealth and driving its economy for much of the 20th century. Pennsylvania and the oil and natural gas industry are inextricably linked throughout the Keystone State’s historyĮven today, few industries - aside from coal and steel - have had the same impact on the state as oil and gas drilling.
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