Agricola on petroleum

I haven't been keeping this blog up as promised. Reading about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has made me realize how little I really know about oil wells and oil drilling. This sort of thing isn't taught in the school curriculum (maybe it should be).

Skipping ahead a few hundred pages, Agricola does have a few things to say about petroleum, which in his time was drawn from surface springs or relatively shallow tunnels. It was refined by boiling in a pot, thus separating what he calls "salt" from "oil of bitumen," which he notes, stays liquid no matter how long you boil it. He says it is highly prized, though he doesn't say exactly what for (Hoover suggests it was used in lamps).

In Book IV Agricola also starts to talk about who owns the mine? ideas which also are relevant when we try to understand what's happening in the Gulf. In his day and also in ours, someone either a person or the government usually owned the land. If a person owns the land, the government still also has an interest in that land. But anyone who found a valuable mine under the ground had an interesting set of rights as well. The first person discovering a vein had the right to work a certain measured area of that vein.

Hoover's commentary goes into much more detail about the overlapping, sometimes conflicting rights of the Overlord, the State, the Landlord or landowner, and the Mine Operator. The king often claimed the metals, while the landowner often claimed the metals together with the land where they were located. But the miners seem to have established a different sort of right by virtue of their expertise, labor, risks and dangers.

"There are other points where the Overlord, the State, or the Landlord have always considered that they had a right to interfere, principally as to the way the miner does his work... Somebody has had to keep peace and settle disputes among the usually turbulent miners (for what other sort of operators would undertake the hazards and handicaps?)" Not much has changed, has it?