Petroleum Trail


The Petroleum Trail is an international tourist trail which runs from Poland to Ukraine linking places associated with the petroleum industry of the 19th century.

Background

During the mid 19th and early 20th centuries, significant oil reserves were discovered and developed in Galicia near Drohobych and Boryslav, The first European attempt to drill for oil was in Bóbrka, Krosno County, Western Galicia, in 1854. By 1867, a well at Kleczany was drilled to about 200 meters using steam. On December 31, 1872, a railway line linking Borysław with the nearby city of Drohobycz was opened. Briton John Simon Bergheim and Canadian William Henry McGarvey came to Galicia in 1882. In 1883, their company, MacGarvey and Bergheim, bored holes of 700 to 1,000 meters and found large oil deposits. In 1885, they renamed their oil developing enterprise the Galician-Karpathian Petroleum Company. The company was headquartered in Vienna, with McGarvey as the chief administrator and Bergheim as field engineer, and built a large refinery at Maryampole near Gorlice, in the southeast corner of Galicia.
Considered the biggest, most efficient enterprise in Austria-Hungary, Maryampole was built in six months and employed 1,000 workers. Subsequently, investors from Britain, Belgium, and Germany established companies to develop the oil and natural gas industries in Galicia. This influx of capital caused the number of petroleum enterprises to shrink from 900 to 484 by 1884, and to 3,700 workers provided by 285 companies by 1890. However, the number of oil refineries increased from thirty-one in 1880 to fifty-four in 1904. By 1904, there were thirty boreholes in Borysław of over 1,000 meters. Production increased by 50% between 1905 and 1906 and then tripled between 1906 and 1909 because of unexpected discoveries of large oil reserves. By 1909, production reached its peak at 2,076,000 tons or 4% of worldwide production. Often called the "Polish Baku", the oil fields of Borysław and nearby Tustanowice accounted for over 90% of the national oil output of the Austria-Hungary Empire. From 500 residents in the 1860s, Borysław had grown to 12,000 by 1898. At the turn of the century, Galicia was ranked fourth in the world as an oil producer. This significant increase in oil production also caused a slump in oil prices. A very rapid decrease in oil production in Galicia occurred just before the Balkans conflicts.
Galicia was the Central Powers' only major domestic source of oil during the Great War.

Sanok County

History