Natural Gas – 100 Years Ago Today, March 25, 1922!
Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Natural gas news from a hundred years ago offers great perspective for discussing one of the cleanest sources of energy available then and still today.
I thought it might be fun and illuminating to look back 100 years ago at what was happening with natural gas. It is eye opening, given all we’ve learned over the last century and, of course, there is little new under the sun. Consider these 100-year old news items (emphasis added):
- Why Do Politicians Never Learn?
- Wild Wells in Louisiana!
- NatGas Yields Big Profits for Coal!
- But, Nothin’s Easy About the Business!
The first piece of old news shows us how little politicians, then as well as now, knew about basic economics, perhaps anticipating the comments today from pols who insist we shouldn’t export LNG:
25 Mar 1922, Sat The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
One would think a governor would grasp the fact more uses and outlets for a product such as natural gas would stimulate more exploration and production for everyone but, of course, all too many pols are reactionary followers rather than leaders.
It must be admitted, though, that natural gas was bit of a wild thing at the time:
25 Mar 1922, Sat The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana) Newspapers.com
One of the reasons it was wild, of course, was that it was the new thing in many ways and very profitable, even for coal companies:
25 Mar 1922, Sat The Wall Street Journal (New York, New York) Newspapers.com
But, nothing is ever easy in business, as this clip shows:
And, so things were on March 25, 1922 and, yet again, we see the more things change, the more they resemble the past, human nature being the predictable thing that it has always been and will always be.
This post appeared first on Natural Gas Now.
