Before I take us back into the history of dams, I’ll share a personal experience. When I first began working in the electric sector as a lobbyist, I attended a meeting hosted by the Washington Public Utility Districts Association (WPUDA) where they invited congressional staff and others to engage with the engineers and technicians and to tour certain facilities. As you may know, Washington State’s Columbia River system of dams is an engineering wonder that has enabled utilities in the state to offer the lowest electric rates for decades – emissions-free and reliable. It’s been about 20 years since that first trip, so some details are fuzzy, but I believe we toured the Rocky Reach Dam owned by Chelan County Public Utility District, and the Bonneville Dam, run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with the hydropower output going to Bonneville Power Administration and its customers.

In this edition, I’ll discuss the chemical sector and how it interacts with the electric sector. But first, a word from my 10thgrade self: “Chemistry is the most boring subject I’ve ever taken.” I am now not as prone to boredom, but while researching this blog, I admittedly flashed back to those long-ago lessons...and shuddered. Ha! However, once I got over the trauma of references to chemical equations and realized – wait for it – the interesting history, I became intrigued.

The timing of this blog is not an accident. As those who’ve read previous blogs know, I am a student of history and the daughter of a Marine Corps officer. I also lived through 9/11 in D.C. As such, I know terrorism when I see it. Terrorist groups, some of which come to control entire governments such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, just to name a few in the last century – there are many more – are aptly named to incite terror. They attract support by focusing on a cause – to elevate the working class or to regain lost territory, but their solution is a zero-sum game, to eliminate their perceived opponents in order to gain power or victory.

With this change, people needed places to keep their excess money to prevent it from being stolen and, when lacking money, they needed a place to borrow it. Archeologists believe that metal was first used for money about 7,000 years ago, but the concept of banking as a trend came to prominence a bit later than some of the other critical infrastructure sectors we have discussed – about 4,000 years ago rather than 5,000-6,000 years ago like some. That is most likely because ancient banking built upon the evolution of these other sectors – particularly communications (described in the Fourth Edition of The Essentials) and transportation.

So, how did we arrive at our modern healthcare system? In early human history, everyday maladies like intestinal aches or colds were treated with herbal remedies. They were considered part of the human experience that could be aided by such treatments. According to Brittanica and aligning with a vague recollection of my college course on the history of science and medicine, in contrast to these treatments (and their presumption of physical causes that could be affected by physical treatments), major illnesses, accidental maiming or death, were, up until relatively recently, considered to be the result of magic, curses, the displeasure of deities, or other supernatural causes. Therefore, the treatments for those were themselves supernatural in nature – appeasement of the gods via sacrifices, counter-curses, potions, suctions, or other similar methods. The use of charms and talismans persists to this day.

During my tenure with Cong. Sherwood, he prioritized working with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and other related agencies to identify priority areas in Pennsylvania for reclamation – an expensive process requiring much federal agency and state coordination. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) mandated the creation of an “abandoned mine land” fund to which all mining operations have contributed since. Nonetheless, just like any fee-based program run by the federal government, funds had to be appropriated and politics were involved in their allocation (shocking!).

Of course, I should have known that the beginning of the oil & gas sector began well before I thought it did. In this case, and for the first time in the lifetime of The Essentials blog…drumroll please…the Romans are no where to be found. Long before the Romans came into power, humans used naturally occurring asphalt for construction – as long as 4,000 years ago. And then the Chinese dominated early drilling and transporting, starting around 1,700 years ago using simple drills on bamboo sticks and bamboo pipelines to transport unrefined petroleum and siphoned natural gas (not called that until later) for both heating and for the distilling of salt. In the 900s, oil fields were discovered and used near modern Baku, Azerbaijan. A century before that, Persian chemists took the lead in figuring out how to distill solid bitumen into kerosene for heating. Monks in Southern Italy coined the term petroleum to cover both solid and liquid forms that were variously called naphta, asphalt, and bitumen. The gas forms of hydrocarbons were not widely used until after the 1700s, when their modern names came into being -- natural gas or methane gas being the most common.

If I’ve made you hungry, feel free to pause and grab a bite before I go into the history (cue the Jeopardy tune for those who need the break). Okay, now we’re back…from an historical standpoint, the term agriculture refers to the domestication of both plants and animals. While humans have gathered grains, nuts and fruits and hunted animals for food since our origins, the systematic growing of certain foods and gathering together of certain preferred animals to be raised for consumption did not begin until about 13,000-11,500 years ago. Just like with the other developments I’ve discussed previously in this blog, various ancient peoples around the globe domesticated foods independently. The first animals to be raised for food were pigs and sheep, followed by cattle. Eventually, camels and horses were domesticated, but not primarily for food consumption. Cows/oxen were both eaten and used to help cultivate other foods.

Manufacturing is the process of turning raw materials or parts into finished goods through the use of tools, human labor, machinery, and chemical processing. It allows businesses to sell finished products at a higher cost than the value of the raw materials used. Large-scale manufacturing allows for goods to be mass-produced using assembly line processes and advanced technologies as core assets.

As you may expect if you’ve read my previous blog, now is when I’ll delve into history a bit. Before machines were invented to help deliver news, information, and intelligence, people did it -- they talked to each other, then walked or ran to deliver messages over longer distances. While unverified, the legend of the Greek messenger Philippides (or Pheidippides), who ran the approximately 26.2 miles from the city of Marathon to Athens to ensure Greek leadership knew of its win against the Persians in the Battle of Marathon, is perhaps the most famous example of a person transporting vital information quickly. Philippides supposedly died from the exertion – a truly heroic effort if true!

Today, we think of three major modes of transportation: land, sea, and air. This blog will mostly focus on the land element, but will touch on the others because overlaps exist between all three modes of transportation and electricity.

But first, some fun facts about water…and its infrastructure. Aside from a very small amount released into space over billions of years, the same water exists today as was here when the earth was formed. It’s kind of wonderful. Water is the ultimate recyclable. According to a professor at Washington State University, forms of water can be found well below the earth's surface, including in fossil fuels (spoiler alert – first overlap between water and electricity).

When I was a month away from turning 10, my father, a Marine Corps aviator, died in a plane crash during a routine training flight. Colonel John Ditto was 44 years old and had served for 24 years. He’d served two tours in Vietnam and had had several close calls, but he was such a good pilot that he was the only non-general officer who had, at least up to that point, ever been inducted into the prestigious Early and Pioneer Naval Aviators Association, better known as the Golden Eagles.