article: Right now, prices are around 60% down on July 2014. Supply has outstripped demand - great news for motorists but a disaster for the UK oil industry. Around 65,000 jobs are estimated to have been lost, many of them in Aberdeen. It is not the first time a glut of cheap oil has given British businesses a battering. But 150 years ago it was not the North Sea that bore the brunt of the downturn - it was north Wales. In the second half of the 19th Century, Flintshire struck oil. Strictly speaking, it struck cannel coal - a dense, smooth, shale-like variety of coal which can be distilled to make oil. While that admittedly sounds a lot less thrilling than the discovery of a black gold "gusher" under the Flintshire hills, it nevertheless heralded a global investment frenzy to rival the early days of the California gold rush. Speculators ploughed close to a million pounds into a variety of coal-oil ventures from Mold to Queensferry. The vast majority of them were to lose their shirts. "It must have been absolutely astounding," said Dr Robin Chesters, Director of the Museum of the Scottish Shale Oil Industry, which has conducted extensive research into the Flintshire "oil-dorado". "It all happened so fast that some of the oil works weren't actually completed and others were put together so quickly that they began to fall down." The seeds of the oil rush were sown in 1858 when an industrialist named Ebenezer Waugh Fernie discovered an exceptionally rich seam of cannel coal at Leeswood Green Colliery, near Mold. Seven years earlier the Scottish scientist James "Paraffin" Young had patented his process of producing oil from coal and established a highly successful oil works at Bathgate in West Lothian. Fernie suspected there was similar money to be made in Leeswood and he set about building an oil works near the colliery. But the budding enterprise was hampered by Young's patent and Fernie's numerous attempts at surreptitious oil production landed him in court. The "Great Paraffine Case" was brought before the Chancery court in London in January 1864. It lasted 33 days, called 73 witnesses and became a cause celebre. The court found in Young's favour and awarded him substantial damages. But his patent expired a few months later anyway, That, together with the huge amount of publicity garnered by the case, meant that Flintshire's cannel coal reserves were suddenly ripe for the distilling. "People who had been reading about this great court case and all the money that could be made realised that they could now go into the business and make their fortune," said Dr Chesters. Would-be oil tycoons from all over Britain and abroad began ploughing money into coal-oil companies. A total of 26 oil works and refineries were built in Flintshire, mainly near the collieries where the cannel coal was mined. People flocked to the area from far and wide in search of work, rents were raised exorbitantly and overcrowding was rife. By late 1865, oil fever had Flintshire in its grip. An account published
summary: The tumbling price of oil has been headline news for months.