Transition in Residues: On Depleted Oil Wells, Radioactive Geophysics, and the Origins of the Twentieth Century's Energy Mix

Abstract

The oil and uranium industries always have been intertwined. Both industries are inherently global and span an extensive geological history. The formation of uranium and oil deposits, and their eventual extraction, is a story circling through early planetary history, continuing in depleted oil wells in Germany, Canada, and France, and lingering well into the second half of the past century. Understanding this history proved to be the key for two businesses that would shape the later twentieth century: the oil and nuclear industries. Oil companies are among the very first to integrate new quantum mechanics and knowledge about radioactive decay into their search for oil. This article locates the origins of this interconnectedness in the emergence of applied geophysics. Based on case studies to the experiments and research projects of geophysicist Richard Ambronn and the studies by the oil service company Schlumberger into measuring radioactive decay as a method of determining underground sediments and finding oil during the 1920s and 1930s, this article argues that the depleted oil sources at Pechelbronn and Celle formed the basis of both industrial and academic developments in the knowledge of radioactivity, geophysics, and petroleum.