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West Virginia has a lot of natural gas and some petroleum. These fuels formed long ago when dead plants and animals were buried under layers of rock and then transformed by heat and pressure. This turned the material into natural gas and petroleum, which then moved upward through the rocks. Sometimes, the gas or oil gets trapped under a layer of rock and forms a reservoir underground. Both resources have had significant impact on other industries, particularly the availability of natural gas for the glass industry.
Recently, most drilling for oil and gas has focused on the Marcellus Shale. The Utica Shale is also being explored, mostly in the Northern Panhandle and far western areas. This is especially true when gas prices are low because Utica Shale can pro...
While prehistoric cultures had certainly encountered the Burning Springs near the Kanawha River about eight miles east of Charleston, the first known European Americans to document them did not occur until 1773. They weren’t real springs but rathe...
Oil and gas were first found in West Virginia in the 1700s in the Kanawha and Little Kanawha river valleys. In the early 1800s, families like the Ruffners discovered oil and gas while drilling for salt. The Ruffners used salt-well tools to help ex...
In 1859, Dr. R. W. Hazlett and his team from Wheeling drilled for oil along Oil Spring Run. Soon, others started drilling in the Little Kanawha area, including Charles Shattuck, Gen. Samuel Karnes, and Cass Rathbone. Karnes struck oil in an old sa...
At the start of the Civil War, Burning Springs (Wirt County) was one of only two oil fields in the world. In 1863, Confederate Gen. William E. Jones burned the field as part of the Jones-Imboden Raid. He claimed that 150,000 barrels of oil were de...
After the Civil War, Johnson Newlon Camden made money from the Burning Springs (Wirt County) oil rush. In 1869, Camden started an oil refining business, one of at least six in Parkersburg, which cleanses the product for various commercial uses. By...
Volcano, located along the border of Wood and Ritchie counties, was an oil boomtown from 1864 to 1897. The Volcanic Oil & Gas Company started drilling in 1864, and the town was founded in 1870. At its peak, Volcano had homes, schools, hotels, ...
In 1890, Bridgeport native Michael L. Benedum started working for Standard Oil. He soon separated from Standard and made a fortune in oil and gas as an independent driller, starting in West Virginia and expanding across the U.S. and internationall...
The Ohio River Railway reached Sistersville in 1884. In 1893, Sistersville became the top oil boomtown in the U.S. By 1898, West Virginia was producing more oil than Pennsylvania. The town's economy grew rapidly as new oil derricks popped up daily...
The Tyler County oil and gas boom spread beyond Sistersville. In 1892, the Polecat oil well hit a rich pool, and in 1894, the Big Moses gas well became one of the largest ever found. This started an oil and gas rush that dramatically increased the...
Success after 1889 was largely due to the identification of oil and gas deposits through the anticlinal theory, developed by geologist Israel C. White of West Virginia University. His theory was first tested in 1889 in Mannington and led to the 19...
Even though Standard Oil closed its Parkersburg refinery in 1936, a major refinery built in 1913 at St. Marys by a Standard Oil competitor, Quaker State, operated until the 1980s.
The carbon black industry, which makes carbon by burning natural gas in a limited way, was started in Calhoun and Wirt counties at the end of the 1800s by Godfrey Cabot. It still plays an important role in the state today.
The oil and gas industry got another boost in 1911 when the Blue Creek field was discovered along Elk River in northern Kanawha County. Several companies, including United Fuel Gas Company (later Columbia Gas), Elk Refining Company, Hope, and Penn...
Pollution from burning fuels like petroleum and methane is a problem. To get more oil and gas, companies now use methods such as pressurizing and fracturing old wells. But this raises concerns about waste water, surface pipelines, and using privat...
In the early 2000s, West Virginia has been a major producer of natural gas, with wells in nearly every county west of the Allegheny Front. Most are shallow, but deeper wells, like those in the Oriskany and Ordovician layers, need more money and ad...
Crude oil production in West Virginia dropped through the late 1900s, staying between 1.5 and 2 million barrels a year by the early 2000s. But with higher demand and less global supply, production began rising sharply. By the early 2020s, the stat...