The World Without Us

With all that carbon in tires, they can be also burned, releasing considerable energy, which makes them hard to extinguish, along with surprising amounts of oily soot that contains some noxious components we invented in a hurry during World War II. After Japan invaded Southeast Asia, it controlled nearly the entire world’s rubber supply. Understanding that their own war machines wouldn’t go far using leather gaskets or wooden wheels, both Germany and the United States drafted their top industries to find a substitute.

The largest plant in the world today that produces synthetic rubber is in Texas. It belongs to the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and was built in 1942, not long after scientists figured out how to make it. Instead of living tropical trees, they used dead marine plants: phytoplankton that died 300 million to 350 million years ago and sank to the sea bottom. Eventually—so the theory goes; the process is poorly understood and sometimes challenged—the phytoplankton were covered with so many sediments and squeezed so hard they metamorphosed into a viscous liquid. From that crude oil, scientists already knew how to refine several useful hydrocarbons. Two of these—styrene, the stuff of Styrofoam, and butadiene, an explosive and highly carcinogenic liquid hydrocarbon—provided the combination to synthesize rubber.

Six decades later, it’s what Goodyear Rubber still makes here, with the same equipment rolling out the base for everything from NASCAR racing tires to chewing gum. Large as the plant is, however, it’s swamped by what surrounds it: one of the most monumental constructs that human beings have imposed on the planet’s surface. The industrial megaplex that begins on the east side of Houston and continues uninterrupted to the Gulf of Mexico, 50 miles away, is the largest concentration of petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies, and storage structures on Earth.

It contains, for example, the tank farm behind razor-edged concertina wire just across the highway from Goodyear—a cluster of cylindrical crude-oil receptacles each a football field’s length in diameter, so wide they appear squat. The omnipresent pipelines that link them run to all compass points, as well as up and down—white, blue, yellow, and green pipelines, the big ones nearly four feet across. At plants like Goodyear, pipelines form archways high enough for trucks to pass under.

Those are just the visible pipes. A satellite-mounted CT scanner flying over Houston would reveal a vast, tangled, carbon-steel circulatory system about three feet below the surface. As in every city and town in the developed world, thin capillaries run down the center of every street, branching off to every house. These are gas lines, comprising so much steel that it’s a wonder that compass needles don’t simply point toward the ground. In Houston, however, gas lines are mere accents, little flourishes. Refinery pipelines wrap around the city as tightly as a woven basket. They move material called light fractions, distilled or catalytically cracked off crude oil, to hundreds of Houston chemical plants—such as Texas Petrochemical, which provides its neighbor Goodyear with butadiene and also concocts a related substance that makes plastic wrap cling. It also produces butane—the feedstock for polyethylene and polypropylene nurdle pellets.

Hundreds of other pipes full of freshly refined gasoline, home heating oil, diesel, and jet fuel hook into the grand patriarch of conduits—the 5,519-mile, 30-inch Colonial Pipeline, whose main trunk starts in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. It picks up more product in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, then climbs the eastern seaboard, sometimes above-ground, sometimes below. The Colonial is typically filled with a lineup of various grades of fuel that pump through it at about four miles per hour until they’re disgorged at a Linden, New Jersey, terminal just below New York Harbor—about a 20-day trip, barring shutdowns or hurricanes.

Imagine future archaeologists clanging their way through all those pipes. What will they make of the thick old steel boilers and multiple stacks behind Texas Petrochemical? (Although, if humans stick around for a few more years, all that old stock, overbuilt back when there were no computers to pinpoint tolerances, will have been dismantled and sold to China, which is buying up scrap iron in America for purposes that some World War II historians question with alarm.)

If those archaeologists were to follow the pipes several hundred feet down, they would encounter an artifact destined to be among the longest-lasting ever made by humans. Beneath the Texas Gulf coast are about 500 salt domes formed when buoyant salts from saline beds five miles down rise through sedimentary layers. Several lie right under Houston. Bullet-shaped, they can be more than a mile across. By drilling into a salt dome and then pumping in water, it is possible to dissolve its interior and use it for storage.