Houston's Energy Corridor: The Air You Are Breathing

The skyline you are driving toward is the headquarters of the American petroleum industry. Houston has more energy company headquarters than any other city in the United States, and probably more than any other city on earth. The concentration is not coincidental, it derives from Spindletop, the oil well that blew in at Beaumont, about eighty-seven miles east of here, on January tenth, nineteen-oh-one.

The gusher produced more oil in a single day than most wells in the country produced in a year. Within months, hundreds of companies had incorporated in Texas to extract, refine, and ship it. The wealth moved to Houston because Houston had the bayou network that connected to Galveston Bay and then the Gulf of Mexico.

The city was founded in eighteen thirty-six and spent its first sixty years being an ordinary Texas market town. Spindletop made it a world capital. The smell you may notice on Interstate Ten west of downtown is the refineries.

The Houston Ship Channel, which runs east of downtown to the bay, is lined with petrochemical plants that constitute the largest refinery complex in the United States by some measures. The Karankawa people lived along the Texas Gulf Coast when Europeans arrived. They were accomplished coastal hunters and fishers who had adapted over thousands of years to the difficult coastal environment.

They were gone by the eighteen fifties, their population destroyed by a combination of European diseases, dispossession, and direct violence. The bayou watershed they inhabited now carries oil company runoff. Houston has no zoning code.

This is a point of local pride and a source of genuine urban planning chaos. You can build a chemical plant next to a school. People have.

The freeway through downtown is eight lanes wide in some sections. It was not enough when they built it and it is not enough now.