Oilmen considered natural gas to be a waste product and flared it until gas industry pioneers learned how to capitalize on its value. Likewise, many companies today consider their old records as useless information to be destroyed.
But innovators grasp the importance of the history within dusty files locked away in corporate vaults. Realizing an intellectual value, some executives donated documents to libraries, where professional archivists catalogued and preserved the papers.
Christopher J. Castaneda, associate professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, coauthored two books based on corporate records at Texas Eastern Corp. and Panhandle Eastern Corp. that were subsequently donated to the Woodson Research Center in Rice University's Fondren Library. Later, he used the same records to help write a book about the role of gas in America.
"Oil and gas firms that are willing to donate their records to an archive achieve a certain prestige and respect in that they are willing to make their history accessible to researchers and scholars," Castaneda said.
Corporate history
Business papers demonstrate how energy companies "evolved over time; how they dealt with challenging issues such as wartime restrictions, environmental concerns, changing technologies, and government regulation," Castaneda said.
Even more importantly, documents provide a company with an "institutional memory," Castaneda said, adding, "History can be used to help managers make policy and strategic decisions that affect the present and the future."
A company or government that shreds or loses its records consequently obliterates its ability to consult its historical experience when dealing with modern problems.
John W. Carlin, archivist of the US, affirmed this in a speech to the International Conference of the Round Table on Archives in Marseilles, France, last fall: "Without records, past mistakes would no longer be lessons for the future," Carlin said.
An internet search for "petroleum" of US National Archives and Records Administration holdings showed more than 700 hits, including reports on US Naval Petroleum Reserves and numerous executive orders.
Other archives
In addition to corporate records, archives also value personal business papers of an individual or family, said Don E. Carleton, director, Center for American History at the University of Texas.
UT's vast oil and gas collections include the papers of independent oilman J.R. Parten, which enabled Carleton to write a book about Parten.
"This collection provides an invaluable source for the political history of state and federal regulation of the oil industry, the Petroleum Administration for War [World War II], the planning and construction of the Big and Little Inch pipelines, and the Petroleum Administration for Defense [Korean War]," said Carleton.
Welders use acetylene generators on horse-drawn wagons to construct a 24-in. Panhandle Eastern Corp. pipeline in the Texas Panhandle. Photo from Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.
Legal challenges also figure into the industry's history. The Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans, has organized the court documents involved with appeals before the Louisiana Supreme Court during 1813-1923.
The University of Oklahoma archives have extensive oil and gas holdings, including details of early discoveries in the Osage Nation and history of the Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Co.
Other academic institutions holding oil and gas collections include the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Louisiana State University in Shreveport, and the University of Tulsa.
All archives accept collections, providing industry with an avenue to preserve its voice in history. The oil and gas story can be promoted to countless people via oil and gas leaders' willingness to ensure greater public access to personal and corporate records.
Panhandle Eastern acquired Texas Eastern and changed its name to PanEnergy Corp. before it merged with Duke Power Co. (now Duke Energy Corp.) in 1997 (OGJ, Dec. 2, 1996, p. 44).
The early documents from Panhandle Eastern and Texas Eastern—key to researching the evolution of the US gas transmission sector—could have been lost without individuals who helped preserve history by donating records to Rice University's archives.