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.
See also: Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and Galicia (Eastern Europe).
During the mid 19th and early 20th centuries, significant oil reserves were discovered and developed in Galicia near Drohobych and Boryslav,[1] [2] The first European attempt to drill for oil was in Bóbrka, Krosno County, Western Galicia, in 1854.[1] [2] By 1867, a well at Kleczany was drilled to about 200 meters using steam.[1] [2] On December 31, 1872, a railway line linking Borysław (now Boryslav) with the nearby city of Drohobycz (now Drohobych) was opened. American John Simon Bergheim and Canadian William Henry McGarvey came to Galicia in 1882.[3] In 1883, their company, MacGarvey and Bergheim, bored holes of 700 to 1,000 meters and found large oil deposits.[1] In 1885, they renamed their oil developing enterprise the Galician-Karpathian Petroleum Company (German: Galizisch-Karpathische Petroleum Aktien-Gesellschaft), headquartered in Vienna, with McGarvey as the chief administrator and Bergheim as field engineer, and built a huge refinery at Maryampole near Gorlice, in the southeast corner of Galicia.[3]
Considered the biggest, most efficient enterprise in Austria-Hungary, Maryampole was built in six months and employed 1,000 men.[3] Subsequently, investors from Britain, Belgium, and Germany established companies to develop the oil and natural gas industries in Galicia.[1] This influx of capital caused the number of petroleum enterprises to shrink from 900 to 484 by 1884, and to 285 companies manned by 3,700 workers by 1890.[1] However, the number of oil refineries increased from thirty-one in 1880 to fifty-four in 1904.[1] By 1904, there were thirty boreholes in Borysław of over 1,000 meters.[1] Production increased by 50% between 1905 and 1906 and then trebled between 1906 and 1909 because of unexpected discoveries of vast oil reserves of which many were gushers.[4] By 1909, production reached its peak at 2,076,000 tons or 4% of worldwide production.[1] [2] 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.[1] [4] [5] From 500 residents in the 1860s, Borysław had swollen to 12,000 by 1898.[4] At the turn of the century, Galicia was ranked fourth in the world as an oil producer.[1] This significant increase in oil production also caused a slump in oil prices.[4] 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.[4]