The
Beginnings of the Oil Economy:
Strictly
speaking, the awareness of petrochemical products in Trinidad started in
the 16th century, when Sir Walter Raleigh caulked his ships at the
Pitch Lake in La Brea. But it wasn't until 350 years later that the
petrochemical industry in Trinidad took its first tentative steps.
In 1857, the Merrimac Oil Company, an oil firm from the United States,
drilled the first successful oil well in the world in La Brea. They struck
oil at 280 feet, but the well was abandoned in 1859, when the company ran
into financial difficulties. The demand was still very limited.
Ten
years later, Captain Walter Darwent, an American soldier, established an
oil company in 1865, the Paria Petroleum Company Limited. Darwent
maintained that combustible fuel could be refined from oil drilled from
the earth, and his entrepreneurial opponent Conrad F. Stollmeyer held the
view that the ideal fuel could be distilled out of the asphalt from the
pitch lake.
Darwent struck oil with three wells drilled in Aripero and San Fernando.
In 1867, they were producing up to 60 gallons a week. (For comparison,
total oil production in Trinidad today is around 125,000 barrels per day.)
Oil
production and refining remained difficult, and after Darwent died only 47
years of age, Trinidad's oil industry remained dormant for another 40
years. At the turn of the century, Randolph Rust and John Lee Lum
resuscitated it.
