Know How, Technology and Economy of the Italian Petroleum Industry between 19th and Early 20th Century

The paper investigates the achievements of the Italian petroleum industry in Northern Italy between mid-19th and early 20th century. Here are highlighted some aspects of technological, political and economic history, together with the advances of the geological knowledge of northern Apennines. In 1911, the Italian government approved the first law of the National State to support domestic oil and gas industry, granting a financial reward for every meter of exploratory drilling. The Italian economist Luigi Einaudi harshly criticized the law because the oil industry managers and technicians at the time did not have both the technological and the financial strength to guarantee satisfactory results. In the same year, the seminal study by Enrico Camerana and Bartolomeo Galdi was published in Bologna, which is an irreplaceable testimony on the state-of-the-art of hydrocarbon research in Emilia. Italy is not (and never has been) a country of “easy” hydrocarbons. Some of the factors that contributed to the many failures of early oil and gas exploration were the financial inconsistency of the oil companies, the scarcity of geological and technical training, together with the intrinsic difficulties of hydrocarbon exploration in the Italian petroleum systems. The focus of Camerana and Galdi aimed to the precise location of surface oil seepages, and to identify the origin of petroleum systems. Lastly, in the timeframe considered in this study, it is worth recalling the publication of two technical treatises by L. Perreau (1885), and by brothers J. and L. Massarenti (1920), the forerunners of drilling manuals in Italy.