by Bruce Wells | Oct 1, 2026 | Petroleum Pioneers
Desperate for their town to live up to its name, community leaders of El Dorado, Kansas, sought petroleum riches — especially after natural gas discoveries at nearby Augusta in 1904 and as early as 1882 at Paola, south of Kansas City. But it would be a giant oilfield, not natural gas, that brought prosperity east of Wichita.
. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Aug 31, 2026 | This Week in Petroleum History
The San Francisco Gas Company was incorporated in 1850 to produce and distribute manufactured gas extracted from coal. Irish immigrants Peter and James Donahue and engineer Joseph Eastland erected a “gasification plant” to distill coal for manufacturing the gas for lighting. Their company in 1852 illuminated San Francisco’s first “town gas” street lamps. San Francisco Gas became Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) in 1905, and by 1915 the company operated almost 8,500 street lamps — each hand lit and shut off every day. The last coal-gas lamp was extinguished in 1930 (also see the History of Con Ed).
