History of Energy as a Business

The modern energy business began twice in the same quarter-century. On 27 August 1859 Edwin Drake's well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, struck oil at 69½ feet, and within twenty years John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil refined most of America's kerosene. On 4 September 1882 Thomas Edison's Pearl Street station in lower Manhattan began selling electricity, and within fifty years Samuel Insull had shown that the way to make power cheap was to build large central stations, serve everyone, and accept regulation as a monopoly. Almost every business model in energy since then is a variation on those two templates: control the bottleneck in a commodity chain (Standard Oil's refineries and pipelines, the Seven Sisters' concessions, OPEC's spare capacity, China's processing plants), or build a capital-intensive network and earn a regulated return on it (Insull's holding companies, today's utilities). The history in between is a sequence of shifts in who captured the value: from oil companies to producer states in the 1970s; from regulated monopolies to competitive markets from the late 1970s; from conventional producers to shale in 2008–2019; and from fuel to equipment as solar, wind and batteries fell in cost by roughly 90% between 2010 and 2023. This section tells that history as a business story, with the decisions, prices and failures that set each era's rules, and draws out the patterns an experienced energy executive or investor carries into the present. Prices are nominal unless stated; oil in $/bbl, power in ¢/kWh or $/MWh, modules in $/W (DC).