After blogging about Suman Palit's GNXP article on how Viagra is saving the Seals, I decided to dig up some details on an old anecdote I'd heard several years back -- how Kerosene saved more Whales than Greenpeace.

From EnterStageRight, this article sets up some of the basic numbers and economics:

By 1833 there were 392 American whaling vessels. By 1846 there were 735 whalers, comprising 80 percent of the whaling fleet of the entire world. Each year whaling produced 4-5 million gallons of sperm oil, 6-10 million gallons of train oil, and 1.6- 5.6 million pounds of bone. The price of train oil rose from 35 cents per gallon in 1825 to 95 cents in 1855.

The demand for whale oil created a rise in prices particularly at the high end of the oil quality spectrum -- clean burning oil from Sperm Whales:

Comparative market prices of the period placed whale oil at 35 cents a gallon in 1835 to 50 cents a gallon in 1850, and sperm oil at 85 cents in 1835 to one dollar and 25 cents in 1850. By 1856, at the peak of the whale oil era, sperm oil reached a staggering one dollar and 77 cents a gallon and was mostly afforded only to those of greater affluence. With a yearly catch of as many as 15,000 "right" whales being hunted and killed in the early 1800s, yielding 6 to 10 million gallons annually, they were brought to the very brink of extinction, and the quest to find alternate less expensive fuels continued.

EnterStageRight continues by describing the motivations & invention of Kerosene:

The first step that led to saving the whales was made by Dr. Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist. In 1849, he devised a method whereby kerosene could be distilled from petroleum. Petroleum had previously been considered either a nuisance, or a miracle cure (an idea originating with Native Americans). Earlier coal-gas methods had been used for lighting since the 1820s, but they were prohibitively expensive. Gesner's kerosene was cheap, easy to produce, could be burned in existing lamps, and did not produce an offensive odor as did most whale oil. It could be stored indefinitely, unlike whale oil, which would eventually spoil.

The economic impact of this innovation was immediate and dramatic:

The price of sperm oil reached its high of $1.77 per gallon in 1856; by 1896 it sold for 40 cents. Yet it could not keep pace with the price of refined petroleum, which dropped from 59 cents per gallon in 1865 to a fraction over seven cents in 1895.

Neither of these articles totally nails a central point I'm looking for -- that Dr. Gesner's work was channeled & focused upon home lighting oils as a result of the price signals he witnessed in the whale oil market.   Had the spot price of whale oil been dramatically cheaper (e.g. if it were based more easily renewable resource than whales), the market would have been less likely to finance Gesner's invention.