alternatehistory.com

Update time! This one's shorter than usual and only has one section because I couldn't really think of another topic to go with it.

Part Eighty-One: Liquid Gold

Liquid Gold:
The late 19th century saw the beginning of the use of hydrocarbons in fuel and lighting. The discovery of fields of oil and natural gas led to several booms in the United States. The first oil boom in the United States was in western Pennsylvania. After the discovery of oil in Titusville in the 1850s, people flocked to the region north of Pittsburgh. However, the Pennsylvania oil boom was only the first in United States history. In the 1890s as much of the country was slowly recovering from the Silver Depression, major energy booms struck two states and helped to spark their economies again.

The first boom began in eastern Indiana in 1889. The original discovery of natural gas in Indiana occurred in 1885 while mining for coal, but the significance was not discovered until four years later. The first drill in the Muncie Gas Field[1] was set up near Muncie, Indiana, and soon there were thousands of gas and oil wells set up across the eastern half of the state. The Indiana Gas Boom led to large economic growth in Indianapolis as well as northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio as the gas was shipped to the Great Lakes. Some of the gas extracted from the field was used for the lighting of cities in the Old Northwest, but this was soon surpassed by electric lighting. However, the natural gas continued to be used in electric power plants in the Old Northwest, and some cities such as Indianapolis and Muncie still have historic Gaslight Districts[2] to commemorate the boom.

The second great energy boom of the 1890s occurred in the state of Houston. There had been suspicions for a long time that there might be oil under southern and eastern Houston, but several attempts to drill in the region had run dry. The first oil find was in 1892 by a team headed by Pattillo Higgins, who founded the Beaumont Oil and Gas Company which later became part of the Gulf Oil Corporation. The extraction and refining industries exploded over the next decades as more discoveries were made in Houston and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast of the United States. The need to refine the extracted oil led to economic booms in coastal cities on the Gulf as well. The port city of Galveston surged to become the largest city in Houston by 1910 and a Texan industrial hub.

[1] In OTL the Trenton Gas Field.
[2] These Gaslight Districts retain their late 19th century architecture and are still lit by gas lighting.