Natural Gas Pioneer (1950)

Duration: 22:33

Year Published: 1950

Sound: sound

Description: Presented by the Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Company, this 1950 industrial film tells the story of the Houston-based natural gas company and promotes its expanding transportation and storage operation. Narrator Dan Donaldson also criticizes federal regulations that fix transmission rates. The Natural Gas Act of 1938 gave the Federal Power Commission jurisdiction over interstate natural gas delivery, allowing it to regulate the transmission rates charged by interstate pipelines. This changed in 1954 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Wisconsin that the Federal Power Commission also had the jurisdiction to regulate wellhead prices for producers that sold natural gas into interstate pipelines. The intrastate market remained largely unregulated at the federal level. Robert Yarnall Richie, who produced and directed this film, was a freelance industrial photographer and filmmaker who worked with various large corporations in Texas and around the globe.