For a specific date in the first energy transition - coal's becoming a distinctive industrial fuel, superior to wood - January 1709 could well do. That month, Abraham Darby, an English metalworker and Quaker entrepreneur, working his blast furnace in a village called Coalbrookdale, figured out a way to remove impurities from coal, thus turning it into coke, a higher-carbon version of coal. The coke replaced charcoal, which is partly-burned wood, and had been the standard fuel for smelting. Darby was convinced, he said, "that a more effective means of iron production may be achieved." He was also ridiculed. "There are many who doubt me foolhardy," he said. But his method worked.
Though it took a few decades to spread, Darby's innovation lowered the cost of smelting iron, making iron much more available for industrial uses, helping to spur the Industrial Revolution. Coal was the fuel source for Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, developed around the same time as Darby's innovation to pump water out of coal mines, and for James Watt's much-improved engine, the commercial introduction of which in 1776 - the same year as the outbreak of the American Revolution and the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - was a decisive moment in the Industrial Revolution. But as energy scholar Vaclav Smil observes, "Even with the rise of industrial machines, the nineteenth century was not run on coal. It ran on wood, charcoal, and crop residues." It was not until 1900 that coal reached the point of supplying half of the world's energy demand. Oil was discovered in northwest Pennsylvania in 1859. But it took more than a century - not until the 1960s - for it to supplant coal as the world's number one energy source. Even so, that hardly meant the end of coal, for consumption has continued to grow. As for natural gas, global consumption has increased 60 percent since 2000.
- Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate & the Clash of Nations, New York, 2020, p.378-9.
