Fire and the Wheel

[Music] [Music] Fire. Fire and the [Music] wheel. Fire is warmth, light, energy. The wheel is mobility released from drudgery. The wheel applies the energy which fire makes. Today's way of life, our whole civilization and economy rest on fire and the wheel fueled and lubricated by a resource laid down in ages past. The resource petroleum. Ever flowing petroleum. That humrum magic substance we call oil. Heat. Heat. Oil has always wanted to be useful. even squeezing itself in small quantities up through the earth to water seal our primitive boats to lubricate early axles and later distilled from coal and shale to light our homes. But it was scarce and expensive until quite recently around the middle of the past century in fact. Then it was through hard experience we learned how to get this humdrum substance with the promise of magic and quantity. As time goes, a 100 years isn't so long. But in this fleeting century, oil and quantity has found ways to improve the way of life of our whole nation and everybody in it and make a fair start on the world. In themselves, oil's ways are humdrum and magical. But when we look beyond what oil is to what it means, we discover the real significance of petroleum, a new bill of rights for its users. The most obvious right, of course, is the right to move around. Once a man in his family had to live close to his job. Now he's free to live where he likes. And if he thinks he can better himself, he's free to look for a new job a 100 miles away and still keep the new home attractive and comfortable with little effort. Once the factories he worked in were bound to the crowded city. Now they're free to move out where there's ground for a more efficient and pleasant plant. Set free from the horsedrawn closeness to raw materials by oilpowered transport, flexible and far-ranging on a network of highways largely surfaced with petroleum. Free to travel their salesmen beyond the close by markets to anywhere in the widewide world as a prospect. Free to ship their goods over undreamed of distances in equal competition over a broader and steadier market. Once our heavy work was done by human toil and sweat. Now another of oil's freedoms. A man uses his head and hands to guide oildriven portable machines. And instead of spending his new leisure in the hot and teeming city, he and his family are free to enjoy pleasures once only for the wealthy. even free to broaden their understanding of their nation and the world they live in through the new freedom to travel anywhere in their own country and nowadays abroad quickly and comfortably and at low cost. To make all this possible, to keep this humrum magical substance plentiful and lowpriced, men must keep the oil flowing from the ground to its users in a continuous stream, never broken, never interrupted. Today's stream began, we think, in the bottoms of ancient seas, where countless tiny creatures eventually became countless drops of oil clinging to countless grains of sand. The layers of sediment over the ages were folded and broken by great slow movements in the earth's outer crust into rock structures where the oil might later be trapped. Today, far below the surface of our earth, structures like these lie buried. How can they invisible be found and tapped for man's use? This is a job for the geologists. Once in a blue moon, the structures are close at hand. But the moon is seldom blue. And so the oil explorers do their hunting mostly in the far places in the hot sands of Arabia and the swamps of Louisiana on the plains of Texas and the icecarved mountains of the Canadian Northwest. Just to replace the oil Americans take out of their own ground, oil men must discover and prove up more than 7 million barrels in new reserves every day. It's true. Oil is where you find it. But truer still, oil is where somebody thinks of finding it. So they search out the surface clues. Now what lies under the Earth? A mile, 2 miles, 3 miles down. There are many reconnaissance techniques, but eventually they send in a seismograph crew. A seismograph charge is a sort of personal earthquake sending down its shock waves to bounce off the deep buried straighta and bring back their echoes to the electric ears called geophones or jugs. Earthbound or seagoing microphones so sensitive that one could record the hoof beatats of an ant walking across its surface. Ready? Kick them up. [Applause] Sho down. The shots go down all over the world. The shots go down and the echoes come back to the jugs. Each jug records its own line on the strip. And when several strips are matched up side by side, the rises and dips of the underground straighta begin to give up their clues. This one could be promising. And now it's a job for the drillers. The first hole in a new and untried location is called a wildcat. The industry average in the United States is eight dry holes to every strike. 8 to one against. Some countries you drill a dry hole, they say maybe you get shot. Use up a lot of drillers that way. Somewhere deep under the very spot of earth on which we stand at this moment, there may be oil. Only the drill will tell. The best exploration instruments in the world can only tell us where there may be oil. And the drill is the payoff. [Music] And now the first mud spurts out to lubricate the bit. And the drill spuds in to begin its grinding journey down through the rocks of ages past to the bed of a sea which was formed when the world was young. Call these men freedom hunters and they'd laugh at you. But that's what they are and that's what they're doing. The drilling floor separates the men from the boys. Far down in the hole, the bit goes dull. Geologist needs a core sample from the bottom. Drilling a well is just one round trip after another. A mile of pipe comes up one stand at a time. A mile of pipe goes back in the hole one stand at a time. And the crew works in a teamwork tempo like one man with five bodies and 10 arms. This well is in a sand where there may be oil. Worth making another round trip for a drill stem test. Lots of water. Looks like even more without a wet box, but that figures. And now the test stem itself. And in its barrel, the pressure chart. A cushion of water with a show of oil. No matter how long you've been in this business, this is the moment you live for. Only once in 2,000 Wildcats, as a rule, do you get a major feel, but when you do, things begin to happen. The old boom town was canvas roofs and dance halls and mud. But now it's kids and trailer camps and wives. A wonderful kind of woman seems to marry oilmen. Somehow able to make the dustiest sand lot into a home. The minute this field is proven, plans will start for good schools, new homes, a water supply, stores, churches, a hospital. The oil companies will pay taxes to finance most of them. They'll contribute to others. And another new field will be backing up that petroleum bill of rights. Oil comes up out of the ground in many forms. East Texas crude, lighter than water, never seen except when cleaning out a line, pushed upward by gas pressure, 1,000 lb to the square inch. Sometimes only a few feet away from wells on the pump. And out in California, some high tar crude that you'd never think would even come up out of the ground. They do say you run out of tank storage. You just saw this stuff off in chunks and stack it up like cordwood. You hear the word depletion? Well, here's some of it in action. Stripper wells, fine producers, once now old and tired, down to a few barrels a week. Today, oil men are building some of these old fields back to new usefulness. Take the Goen's lease down to 53 barrels a day. Water flooding brought it up to 900. True conservation isn't hoarding. It's making the most efficient use of a resource so that our grandchildren can keep the stream in motion. Oil is the only big industry to create and build its own transportation system. The pipelines which carry most of its crude from field to refinery and a surprising lot of its refined products to their market. This kind of going is boy work to a pipeliner. No mud to wait in up to his hips while sand blows in his eyes. No mountains to blast and blizzards or river crossings to lay and flood. And after a year's planting, no one would ever know that a few feet down, oil is on its way to 150 million users. In the air above the line, a man traces the invisible stream with his shining wings, looking always downward for something he hopes he will not see. for the shiny black slick on the earth or water that may signal a leak in the high pressure line. To keep oil's freedoms within everybody's reach, its transportation must be kept low in cost. Powered by its synchronized pumping stations, the pipeline is a one-way carrier with no wasteful empties to ship back. And it carries the oil in bulk without the cost of packaging to the terminals and refineries. [Music] Petroleum in its natural state is of little use. The refineries make it useful. You notice a steady humming sound in a refinery. It means that everything is on stream in this vast interconnected symphony of steam and steel. A refinery, complicated though it looks, performs only three basic processes. It sorts, it treats, and it changes. The crude oil in this still isn't a simple chemical like water or salt. It's a fantastic jumble of many hydrocarbon combinations. But fortunately, these combinations all have different boiling points. To sort them out, the crude is heated into a sort of gaseous goulash and piped into a cooling column. The rising fractions cool until each hits the temperature tray of its own boiling point. when it condenses back into a liquid and it's drawn off. Heavy lube oil stock down in the hot bottom, then diesel fuel, gas oil, kerosene, then the napas. The light ends and gasolines go out through the top to be reprocessed or stored. So, the refinery sorts. Second, it treats some of these components to remove undesirable impurities. And third, it changes by heat and pressure, by cracking, and lately by reforming. For today's demands on that everexpanding bill of rights, there is just not enough gasoline occurring naturally in any crude. And for the new engines, what there is isn't good enough. So, the refinery actually changes some heavy components into more gasoline. In cracking, they take large molecules and literally crack them apart into more and lighter ones. Thermal cracking goes back many years. But in 1930, a Red Horse lab started experimenting with the use of catalysts in cracking oil. The hot oil vapors passed through the catalyst bed and came out on the other side with a desired split personality. Fuel oil changed into gasoline and a wonderful new gasoline, gumfree and high octane, particularly good for the burgeoning aviation industry. But there was a hitch. Look at the catalyst. Each pellet is coated over with a film of coke and the catalyst no longer functions. In 1936, researchmen began to ask, instead of flowing the vapor through the catalyst, could we flow the catalyst through the vapor, burn off the coke outside and send it back through the reactor in a continuous stream. Assembly line cracking, one of the greatest advances in the whole history of petroleum processing, if it could be made to work. Pilot plants explored the problems. How to seal in the hot vapors? How to control the flow of catalyst. Everything was new. Everything took time. And then suddenly the time ran out. We interrupt this broadcast for a special news bulletin of the greatest importance. The Second World War. And here is the story of how an industry met one of its challenges as told by a man who was there. As the men who held the reigns of the flying red horse hurried together in those first hours, only two things were certain. We were in it up to our necks. And the millions of men that America would put into the struggle would fly, ride, and fight with [Music] gasoline. Keep them flying was no longer just a corny slogan. We were already making 100 octane a gas in the fixed bed caters, but the new fleets would need much, much more. The best chance was the thermophor catalytic cracker TCC. So we got on it. Special delivery. Experimental rigs are vulnerable. Vulnerable to accident. Vulnerable if the guard relaxed to sabotage. Men and women took leave to serve their country in uniform. Others served their country in short sleeves and dungarees. And not always without danger. and the time kept running out. Then, almost without our realizing it, the day came. October 7th, 1943. On the 11th, there'd be a big official ceremony to put the TCC on stream. If nothing happened in tonight's private and personal preview, 29 men and 2900 butterflies, 100 to every stomach. [Applause] 29 men on those first three shifts. 10 years later, 27 of them will still be in the family of the Flying Red Horse. Group insurance, savings plans, retirement annuities. It's that and it's more than that. We've been dry running since noon, bypassing the vapor. In 1914, a 42gallon barrel of crude gave up only 8 gallons of gasoline. If this rig works tonight, we'll get almost half the barrel. The man in the brown suit is Uncle John Newton. He runs the place, but he's not in charge tonight. It's Ralph Snow's ball. Now, the high flown name for this sort of scene is economic democracy, which means we're all in this together. Each man doing what he does best. Each man depending on the others in the team. Each one essential to the stream. There's no job in the company if the man or woman quit wouldn't have to be filled again. And soon start the buckets. If this rig works tonight, a refinery will have a brand new flexibility from any type of crude. It can make whatever products the marketers need whenever. Paper out. If this rig works tonight, it's got to work. Vapor in. And she's on [Music] stream. And thus it was that the big cat went on stream to the everlasting credit of every rider of the flying red horse. From all the refineries all over the world, the stream keeps pulsing out to the people who need it. 6,000 gallons in an overland truck. 10,000 gallons in a tank car. All the gallons you can pump through the product pipelines out of the refineries to the cities. 2 and 1/2 million gallons, give or take, in the barge trains chugging up the inland rivers and in the ocean harbors. and up to 10 million gallons in a super tanker to anywhere in the energy hungry world. The stream keeps flowing. The stream keeps swelling for very long distances. The tanker is still the cheapest petroleum carrier. She'll float a gallon of product from Texas to New York for less than a penny stamp, playing tag with the dolphins if that's the way it breaks. or in whether the gulls won't go out in the stream keeps moving on to the thirsty [Applause] [Music] machines. For every ship that transports oil, oil services thousands all over the world. The great steam turbines, which drive America's newest liner, are lubricated with 15,000 gallons of marine oil, a sample of which is picked up at every New York turnaround, to be checked and tested at the technical service laboratory. The technicians check and improve a thousand manifestations of petroleum's freedoms. Some are familiar to everybody. the synthetic fabrics, the cosmetics, the ever multiplying plastics and prochemicals, the antihistamines and the other new drugs. Many are less apparent. Paper coating waxes, weed killers, hydraulic drive fluids. Everything from better lubricants to free our machines from friction to improved fuels to free our homes from discomfort. Changing petroleum now, not only by heat and pressure and catalyst, but by the electronic computations of magic brains. And perhaps the next threshold in our advancing industrial freedoms, by radiation. Wherever we look in America's teeming landscape, on every street, behind every window, some petroleum product is in essential use, bringing a new freedom to hither two earthbound mortals. It opens new horizons in a thousand industries. It supplies the man on the land with a new portable energy which lets him raise more food and fiber than half a dozen farmers could raise before oil. It brings urban convenience and comforts to anybody anywhere in any weather. And it keeps on protecting for everyone that item A in petroleum's bill of rights. The right to live where he wants to, to work where he wants to, to go where he wants to. This humdrum magical fluid fuels the modern Aladdin's lamp from which have come millions of jobs. new jobs in petroleum, of course, but also in the automobile industry, highways, motor trucking. And where once a man might have been along in years before he could save up the capital to go into business for himself, today people he will never meet will pull their savings, build a station, and lease it to him, letting him become an independent businessman at an age when his future and the things he wants to do for his children are still ahead of him. Today, there's hardly a hamlet where we can't get service from one of the