HAVE you ever stopped to think what life for many would be like without petroleum and its products?
Oil made from petroleum is used to lubricate motor vehicles, bicycles,
strollers, and other things with moving parts. Oil lessens friction,
thus slowing the breakdown of machine components. But that is not all.
Oil is used to make fuel for planes, automobiles, and heating systems. A multitude of cosmetics, paints, inks, drugs, fertilizers, and plastics as well as a myriad of other items contain petroleum products. Daily life for many would be drastically different without oil. Little wonder that according to one source, petroleum and its derivatives have “a greater variety of uses than perhaps any other substance in the world.” How do we get oil? Where does it come from? How long has mankind used it?
Petroleum substances were used by the Babylonians for their kiln-dried
bricks, by the Egyptians in the mummification process, and by other
ancient peoples for medicinal purposes.
Who
would have imagined that this product would come to be of such
importance in today’s world? No one can deny that modern industrial
civilization depends on petroleum.
The
use of oil from petroleum for artificial lighting was oil’s springboard
to fame. As early as the 15th century, oil from surface wells was used
in lamps in Baku, today’s capital of Azerbaijan. In 1650, shallow oil
reservoirs were dug in Romania, where oil, in the form of kerosene, was
used for lighting. By the mid-19th century, that country and others in
Eastern Europe already had a prosperous oil industry.
In
the United States, it was mainly the search for a high-quality
illuminant in the 1800’s that made a group of men direct their efforts
toward oil. These men rightly concluded that in order to produce enough
kerosene to supply the market, they would have to drill for oil. So in
1859 an oil well was successfully drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil fever
had begun. What happened next?
The
word “petroleum” comes from Latin and means “rock oil.” It is
customarily used to identify two closely related compounds—natural gas,
also known as methane, and oil. Both substances sometimes seep to the
surface through cracks in the earth. As for oil, it can be liquid or in
the form of asphalt, pitch, bitumen, or tar.
PETROLEUM AND OIL—WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
Although usually coming from what are called oil wells, oil is in fact
petroleum, or crude oil, that issues from below the ground. Petroleum
is defined as “a thick, flammable, yellow-to-black mixture of gaseous,
liquid, and solid hydrocarbons that occurs naturally beneath the earth’s
surface.” It “can be separated into fractions including natural gas,
gasoline, naphtha, kerosene, fuel and lubricating oils, paraffin wax,
and asphalt and is used as raw material for a wide variety of derivative
products.”—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.