An oil and gas powered industrial revolution?

So, much is made of the fact that our industrial revolution depended on the convenient energy stores available in fossil fuels. Further, when talking about fossil fuels for the early industrial revolution, people seem to pretty much exclusively talk about coal. But what about oil and gas? They are plentiful, often easily available and energy dense. If the industrial revolution started in the Middle East or Venezuela or Texas (to pick some random examples) could it make the jump to the local fossil fuels? Or is there something inherently less suitable about oil and gas for that stage of industrial evolution?

fasquardon
 
Have Telford's steam carriage be picked up by the British government instead of the railways.

By the time Telford came along, the industrial revolution was already moving down the coal-powered path. And in any case, why would steam carriages make steel producers use oil (rare in Britain) to smelt steel when they had lots of coal? Or mine operators to abandon coal as the fuel for their mine pumps when they are mining coal?

Due to Britain's geography, I don't see any way for a British industrial revolution to not be primarily coal powered.

fasquardon
 
The problem with using oil and gas as fuel is that you have to have an industry in place to store and transport them. Pipes, wells, refineries, all have to be constructed before you can use them effectively. Coal on the other hand can be dug out of the ground by hand and thrown in the back of a wagon or left piled on the ground until needed. The infrastructure for the use and transportation of coal was already in place since it's effectively just a rock. While it would be technically doable I just can't see early industry using oil or gas. There's too much you need to build first.
 
But the problem then is you need a deep societal PoD hundreds of years old? You can't have an industrial revolution start in the new world because the system of extraction there vehemently opposed such and in any case there was a far higher rural population. Nevermind other issues.

That's not even talking about the issues with Persia as a nexus of the industrial revolution. I just can't see it; the foundations of the industrial revolution in Europe are hundreds upon hundreds of years old, and all of the possible regions have coal as more accessible than oil.
 
But the problem then is you need a deep societal PoD hundreds of years old?

And whatever is the problem with that? Some of the discussions on this part of the forum involve atls that start in the ice age.

The problem with using oil and gas as fuel is that you have to have an industry in place to store and transport them. Pipes, wells, refineries, all have to be constructed before you can use them effectively. Coal on the other hand can be dug out of the ground by hand and thrown in the back of a wagon or left piled on the ground until needed. The infrastructure for the use and transportation of coal was already in place since it's effectively just a rock. While it would be technically doable I just can't see early industry using oil or gas. There's too much you need to build first.

Well, you can put pitch in a bucket.

I do agree however, this seems to be the biggest stumbling block to the use of these fuels by early industrial societies to me as well.

fasquardon
 
It's not just extracting crude oil from the ground or capturing natural gas from gas wells.

In the case of gas, it's economic transport, meaning massive pipelines, which didn't happen until the 1940s IOTL. That meant the requisite metallurgy and construction techniques to realize this engineering feat. That's why, until the '40s, so much gas usage was so-called "town gas" made from coal with a hefty carbon monoxide content and half the heating value of natural gas.

In the case of oil, it's refining technology. Crude oil is often loaded with salts and sulfur compounds and is not all that useful as such. One needs to distill off the various fractions (e.g., light ends; gasoline; naphtha/kerosene/jet fuel) and refine them further (e.g., alkylation reactions to raise gasoline's octane number) to make crude oil products truly useful. The beginnings of that processing technology didn't start to come about until the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and more modern practices didn't start to come about until the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Short version: the bases for an oil/gas driven industrial revolution aren't there.
 

Riain

Banned
I read once that oil didn't become important in the world economy until the texas gushers on 1901, someone might know more about this topic than I do.

Also the first oil refinery wasn't built until 1861, long after the industrial revolution had begun. However oil was a major driver of industrial development in the USA.
 
In the case of gas, it's economic transport, meaning massive pipelines, which didn't happen until the 1940s IOTL. That meant the requisite metallurgy and construction techniques to realize this engineering feat. That's why, until the '40s, so much gas usage was so-called "town gas" made from coal with a hefty carbon monoxide content and half the heating value of natural gas.

The problem of economic transport for coal was also an issue - oftentimes it was solved by bringing the industry to the coal, rather than moving the coal to the iron ore fields or the cities. Is there anything that stops this for gas wells?

In the case of oil, it's refining technology. Crude oil is often loaded with salts and sulfur compounds and is not all that useful as such. One needs to distill off the various fractions (e.g., light ends; gasoline; naphtha/kerosene/jet fuel) and refine them further (e.g., alkylation reactions to raise gasoline's octane number) to make crude oil products truly useful. The beginnings of that processing technology didn't start to come about until the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and more modern practices didn't start to come about until the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Well, that raises two questions:

First: One of the boasts I've heard about some of the Texas cruedes are that they are good enough you could "use them in a salad dressing" (and they are pure enough that at the very least you can use them in a diesel engine directly, if not gasoline engines). Are there no crude oils (from onshore wells) in Eurasia that are of similar purity?

Second: Does refining technology require coal-powered industry to make? For example, could an advanced agrarian economy like 18th Century Europe or 11th Century China build that sort of machinery?

fasquardon
 
Second: Does refining technology require coal-powered industry to make? For example, could an advanced agrarian economy like 18th Century Europe or 11th Century China build that sort of machinery?

fasquardon

Oil refineries require relatively good steel in large amounts to be useful because for oil to used it has to be avaliable in large amounts. The metallurgy for high strength and large batch steel didnt exist in those places til later and to get large amounts high quality steel coke was used which requires coal.
 
Do you really need to have modern levels of oil transport and efficiency? You can surely store crude in a metal can and then burn it for heat. It will be dirty and inefficient as hell, but that didn't stop the coal revolution.l
 

iddt3

Donor
What about just putting the factories over natural gas deposits? You have to transport everything else there, but just burning the gas at the extraction point should give you a pretty solid energy source. You'd have to do transportation by canal or coal/oil/electric powered rail, but I could see industry starting there, in the same way it started around stream powered mills OTL.
 

Riain

Banned
You can pipe oil and gas, so you don't have to co-locate factories on oil/gasfields like you do with coal.
 
How about biogas?

i can see the the book on that development already -
About Men and Manure, the early development of the industrial revolution.
 
How about biogas?

i can see the the book on that development already -
About Men and Manure, the early development of the industrial revolution.

There's real problems with scaling it up to a large scale, but I could see an artisanal/cottage scale biogas revolution giving some society the technological base needed to harness natural gas.

fasquardon
 
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