And all the prosperity, longer lives and freedom it has helped produce.

An op-ecolumn from Investor’s Business Daily, “Let’s Celebrate Oil’s 150th Birthday And The Value It Adds To Our Lives,” by Alex Epstein. Excerpt:

Nearly every item in your life would either not exist or be far more expensive without oil; there is simply no comparable source of practical, portable energy.

Yet today people increasingly label oil a pollutant that damages rather than enhances our lives and, even worse, an addiction — likening our consumption of oil to a junkie’s self-destructive heroin habit. This is profoundly ignorant, not to mention unfair to the petroleum industry that tirelessly innovates, year after year, to find more oil and extract it more efficiently.

Does this mean that no one should look for alternatives to oil? Of course entrepreneurs should — if they believe that they can truly match or exceed oil’s value in the market. For example, if a liberated nuclear industry can provide ultracheap electric power that makes petroleum the whale oil of the 21st century, that will be something to celebrate.

Today, though, we should be celebrating petroleum — “the juice of the fountain of eternal youth” — and the industry, past and present, that uses it to work miracles in our lives.

And of course, the blog at the Scientific American uses the occasion to bemoan petroleum’s baleful effect. Reminding us of a good rule of thumb: Never read anything with the question “whither” in the headline.

The American Energy Alliance helpfully supplies more, good links to articles and commentary on the 150th anniversary of the successful drilling of the first commercial oil well in the United States, completed at Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia Inquirer, “Obscure, unsung genius of Penna.’s early oil boom“:

TITUSVILLE, Pa. – The oil boom that began 150 years ago in this small northwestern Pennsylvania town changed the world and made countless people rich, but not the man who found the way to extract black gold from the earth.

Edwin Laurentine Drake died an invalid, virtually penniless. In his later years, he relied on the goodwill of friends and a state pension given late in life to recognize the millions of dollars in tax revenue Pennsylvania made thanks to his drilling method.

The Titusville Herald, “The drizzle didn’t stop the sizzle with 240 attending BBQ,” celebrating the return of Penny Pennzoil to Titusville, 50 years on.

And from the inimitable Daniel Yergin, writing in “Foreign Policy“: “Oil’s very future is now being seriously questioned, debated, and challenged. The author of an acclaimed history explains why, just as we need more oil than ever, it is changing faster than we can keep up with.”

It was 150 years ago today that Col. Edwin L. Drake, drilling for Seneca Rock Oil Co., struck oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, giving birth to the U.S. oil industry — one of the true economic foundations of U.S. prosperity, mobility, health and freedom.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “The Birth of an Industry.”

Associated Press, “Titusville driller’s success enriched world”

The American (American Enterprise Institute), “Drake’s World“:

What Drake really did was apply ingenuity and technological innovation in a completely unorthodox manner to help solve one of society’s growing problems. Drake and the investors who backed him were derided for pursuing the notion of drilling for oil in the same manner that drillers bored salt wells. But their success with their supposedly foolish endeavors showed that oil could be extracted from below ground in substantial quantities. And with that success, the oil rush was on.

By the summer of 1859, people had already begun to realize that “rock oil,” as it was known, could serve two very useful purposes. One, it could be refined to provide kerosene, an illuminant that might light up homes and businesses. Up to that time people used wicks dipped in fat, or dirty “town gas” produced from coal, or the oil extracted from the heads of sperm whales. But the global supply of whales was dwindling, and the price of sperm oil was increasing, so Drake’s discovery was welcome news in helping bring people’s lives into the modern era.

Drake’s oil gusher solved another problem, too. Petroleum stood poised to provide the lubricants that a rapidly mechanized, industrializing society would require. Today roughly a quarter of our petroleum consumption goes to things like lubricants, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides, rather than into the tanks of our cars.

WQED has a six-minute video on the Drake Oil Museum here.

The Oil Region economic development and tourism people have a good website, as well. This weekend it’s the Oil Festival!

(Photo: Drake Well Museum, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission)