This article was first published in Ěý
My first encounter with the importance of oil was in 1962. I had just watched an episode of the witty sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies that began with a catchy theme song: “Come and listen to my story about a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. And then one day he was shootin’ at some food, and up through the ground came a-bubblin’ crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea. Well, the first thing you know, ol’ Jed’s a millionaire.”
Why would someone become a millionaire just because a thick black fluid bubbled out of the ground on his property? That really didn’t come clear to me until I was studying organic chemistry. And then it did not take long to realize that the world runs on oil.
Besides being critical for transportation, oil is the source of the chemicals that can be converted into pharmaceuticals, synthetic fibres, plastics, detergents, cosmetics, adhesives, lubricants, paints, roofing materials and asphalt. Without oil, modern civilization grinds to a halt. That makes for a fascinating story.
First, some terms need clarification. Although “petroleum” and “oil” are often used interchangeably, they are not the same.
Millions of years ago, tiny algae, zooplankton and bacteria (not dinosaurs) died and settled on the sea floor where they eventually became buried in sand and mud. In this anaerobic environment, under pressure and heat, they were converted into a mixture of hydrocarbons, molecules that contain only carbon and hydrogen. This mixture, being lighter than water, travelled up and leached into porous sedimentary rock and was then trapped by a layer of impermeable rock forming a reservoir of petroleum. When this layer is cracked, petroleum escapes, explaining why the term derives from the Latin “petra” (rock) and “oleum” oil.
But oil is only part of petroleum, which also contains heavy hydrocarbons that have the consistency of tar, and light ones that are referred to as natural gas. So “oil” means “crude oil,” the liquid part of petroleum.
Petroleum can seep to the surface when there are fissures is the impermeable rocks, a phenomenon first discovered by the Mesopotamians some 5,000 years ago. As the lighter hydrocarbons evaporate, a thick, viscous, black substance remains that historically was called “pitch” although the accepted term today is “bitumen.” This substance was found to be waterproof and was used by Babylonians to seal buildings and boats.
The ancient Egyptians used “pitch” to preserve mummies, and as we learn from Genesis 6:14, “God commanded Noah to coat the Ark with pitch inside and out to make it watertight for the Flood.” Then in Exodus 2:3, we find that “Moses’ mother got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.”
Archeologists have also discovered that in ancient Baghdad streets were paved with tar found in natural tar pits where petroleum had risen to the surface.
Around 1000 BCE, the Chinese fitted bamboo poles with metal bits to drill into the ground and bring oil and natural gas to the surface that they then ignited to evaporate sea water and collect the salt that was left. By the 10th century, the Chinese had extensive bamboo pipelines connecting gas wells with salt springs.
Persian chemists had also learned to distil petroleum and isolate highly flammable components that were used in warfare as well as distillates that were used as medicine. In the 18th century, under Empress Elizabeth of Russia, the first oil refinery was built to distil “rock oil” and capture a fraction that was burned as fuel in oil lamps to light churches and monasteries, but it seems news of this technology did not spread.
The oil industry in North America was actually triggered by a discovery in the 1840s by Abraham Gesner, a Nova-Scotia-born physician and geologist. In that pre-electricity era, whale oil lamps were commonly used to light homes. These were not ideal since they gave off a smell and with time the oil would go rancid. As it happened, Gesner was experimenting with a sample of bitumen to see what sort of hydrocarbons it would give off when heated. One fraction that boiled in the 150-275 Celsius range turned out to be particularly suitable for lamps because it was not a heavy oil like the higher boiling components and did not form an explosive vapour-air mixture like the lower boiling components. It burned with a brighter flame, produced less odour than whale oil and — unlike whale oil, which chemically is a fat — did not go rancid.
Gesner first called his product “keroselain” from two Greek words for “wax” and “oil” since the bitumen from which it was produced was a waxy, oily substance. Later, the term was contracted to kerosene, the substance that would put the whale oil industry out of business.
It was a search for the practical production of kerosene that in 1859 caused Edwin Drake to drill for oil in Titusville, Penn., where people had noted petroleum seeping to the surface. The well produced oil, but at the time only the kerosene fraction was of interest since the automobile had not yet been invented and there was no market for the lower boiling components.
That changed dramatically in 1885 when German engineer Karl Benz built the first practical gasoline-powered internal combustion vehicle. Before long, gasoline became a prime commodity and refineries with giant fractionating columns were designed to separate petroleum based on the different boiling points of natural gas, gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, lubricating oil and the residue, asphalt. A process called “cracking” that uses a catalyst and heat to break the heavier, less-useful fractions into gasoline was also developed.
In the 1800s, chemists had also shown that compounds distilled from petroleum or from the tar left when coal burns could through various reactions be transformed into dyes and pharmaceutical products. The demand for these distillates increased significantly with the invention in 1906 of the first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, followed by nylon in the 1930s, both of which required petroleum components for production.
Clearly, without oil, we can say bye-bye not only to our cars, ships and planes, but also to numerous consumer items ranging from plastics and drugs to fertilizer and heating oil on which our society depends. It is obvious why “black gold” made Jed a millionaire. And why the Iran war is causing such turmoil.
