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| The Grandma visited Titusville, Pennsylvania |
Today, The Grandma has been updating her investments. COVID has changes a lot of things in our society and one of them are transports. Due to this, the price of petroleum has going down. If we join this fact woth the idea of implementing green policies in the closer future in transports, we can think that, perhaps, investing in petroleum is not as interesting as was before.
The Grandma has been reading about petroleum and about how, on a day like today in 1859, petroleum was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania leading to the world's first commercially successful oil well.
Petroleum is a naturally occurring, yellowish-black liquid found in geological formations beneath the Earth's surface.
It is commonly refined into various types of fuels. Components of petroleum are separated using a technique called fractional distillation.
It consists of naturally occurring hydrocarbons of various molecular weights and may contain miscellaneous organic compounds. The name petroleum covers both naturally occurring unprocessed crude oil and petroleum products that are made up of refined crude oil. A fossil fuel, petroleum is formed when large quantities of dead organisms, mostly zooplankton and algae, are buried underneath sedimentary rock and subjected to both intense heat and pressure.
More information: AAPG
Petroleum has mostly been recovered by oil drilling, natural petroleum springs are rare. Drilling is carried out after studies of structural geology at the reservoir scale, sedimentary basin analysis, and reservoir characterisation, mainly in terms of the porosity and permeability of geologic reservoir structures, have been completed.
It is refined and separated, most easily by distillation, into numerous consumer products, from gasoline (petrol) and kerosene to asphalt and chemical reagents (ethylene, propylene, butene, acrylic acid, para-xylene) used to make plastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals.
Petroleum is used in manufacturing a wide variety of materials, and it is estimated that the world consumes about 95 million barrels each day.
The use of petroleum as fuel is a major cause of global warming and ocean acidification. According to the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without fossil fuel
phase-out, including petroleum, there will be severe, pervasive, and
irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.
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| The Grandma visited Titusville, Pennsylvania |
Petroleum, in one form or another, has been used since ancient times, and is now important across society, including in economy, politics and technology.
The rise in importance was due to the invention of the internal combustion engine, the rise in commercial aviation, and the importance of petroleum to industrial organic chemistry, particularly the synthesis of plastics, fertilisers, solvents, adhesives and pesticides.
More than 4000 years ago, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was used in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca, near Babylon, and a pitch spring on Zacynthus.
Great quantities of it were found on the banks of the river Issus, one of the tributaries of the Euphrates. Ancient Persian tablets indicate the medicinal and lighting uses of petroleum in the upper levels of their society.
The use of petroleum in ancient China dates back to more than 2000 years ago. In I Ching, one of the earliest Chinese writings cites that oil in its raw state, without refining, was first discovered, extracted, and used in China in the first century BCE.
In addition, the Chinese were the first to record the use of petroleum as fuel as early as the fourth century BCE. By 347 CE, oil was produced from bamboo-drilled wells in China.
Crude oil was often
distilled by Persian chemists, with clear descriptions given in Arabic
handbooks such as those of Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes). The
streets of Baghdad were paved with tar, derived from petroleum that
became accessible from natural fields in the region.
More information: National Geographical
In the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan. These fields were described by the Arab geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those wells as hundreds of shiploads. Arab and Persian chemists also distilled crude oil in order to produce flammable products for military purposes.
Through Islamic Spain, distillation became available in Western Europe by the 12th century. It has also been present in Romania since the 13th century, being recorded as păcură.
Early British explorers
to Myanmar documented a flourishing oil extraction industry based in
Yenangyaung that, in 1795, had hundreds of hand-dug wells under
production.
Pechelbronn (Pitch
fountain) is said to be the first European site where petroleum has been
explored and used. The still active Erdpechquelle, a spring where
petroleum appears mixed with water has been used since 1498, notably for
medical purposes. Oil sands have been mined since the 18th century. In
Wietze in lower Saxony, natural asphalt/bitumen has been explored since
the 18th century. Both in Pechelbronn as in Wietze, the coal industry
dominated the petroleum technologies.
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| Titusville, Pennsylvania |
The word petroleum comes from Medieval Latin petroleum, literally rock oil, which comes from Latin petra, rock, from Ancient Greek: πέτρα, romanized: petra, rock and Latin oleum, oil, from Ancient Greek: ἔλαιον, romanized: élaion, oil.
Chemist James Young noticed a natural petroleum seepage in the Riddings colliery at Alfreton, Derbyshire from which he distilled a light thin oil suitable for use as lamp oil, at the same time obtaining a more viscous oil suitable for lubricating machinery.
In 1848, Young set up a small business refining the crude oil. Young eventually succeeded, by distilling cannel coal at a low heat, in creating a fluid resembling petroleum, which when treated in the same way as the seep oil gave similar products. Young found that by slow distillation he could obtain a number of useful liquids from it, one of which he named paraffine oil because at low temperatures it congealed into a substance resembling paraffin wax.
The production of these
oils and solid paraffin wax from coal formed the subject of his patent
dated 17 October 1850. In 1850 Young & Meldrum and Edward William
Binney entered into partnership under the title of E.W. Binney & Co.
at Bathgate in West Lothian and E. Meldrum & Co. at Glasgow; their
works at Bathgate were completed in 1851 and became the first truly
commercial oil-works in the world with the first modern oil refinery.
The
world's first oil refinery was built in 1856 by Ignacy Łukasiewicz. His
achievements also included the discovery of how to distill kerosene
from seep oil, the invention of the modern kerosene lamp (1853), the
introduction of the first modern street lamp in Europe (1853), and the
construction of the world's first modern oil well (1854).
The demand for petroleum as a fuel for lighting in North America and around the world quickly grew. Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is popularly considered the first modern well.
More information: Science Direct
Titusville is a city in the far east corner of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, United States.
The population was 5,287 at the 2018 census. Titusville is known as the birthplace of the American oil industry and for a number of years, was the leading oil producing region in the world. Titusville was notable for its lumber industry, including 17 sawmills, as well as its plastic, and tool making industries.
The area was first settled in 1796 by Jonathan Titus. Within 14 years, others bought and improved land lying near his, along the banks of what is now Oil Creek. Titus named the village Edinburg(h), but as it grew, the settlers began to call the hamlet Titusville. The village was incorporated as a borough in 1849. It was a slow-growing community until the 1850s, when petroleum was discovered in the region.
Oil was known to exist there, but there was no practical way to extract it. Its
main use at that time had been as a medicine for both animals and
humans. In the late 1850s, Seneca Oil Company, formerly the Pennsylvania
Rock Oil Company, sent Col. Edwin L. Drake, to start drilling on a
piece of leased land just south of Titusville, near what is now Oil
Creek State Park.
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| Then and now, Titusville |
In the summer of 1859, Drake hired a salt well driller, William A. Smith. They had many difficulties but, on August 27, at the site of an oil spring just south of Titusville, they finally drilled a well that could be commercially successful.
Teamsters were needed immediately to transport the oil to markets. In 1862, the Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad was built between Titusville and Corry, where the product was transferred to larger east-west railroad lines.
In 1865, pipelines were laid directly to the line and the demand for teamsters practically ended. The next year the railroad line was extended south to Petroleum Centre and Oil City.
The Union & Titusville Railroad was built in 1865. That line became part of the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in 1871. That fall, President Ulysses S. Grant visited Titusville to view the important region. Other oil-related businesses were quickly established. Eight refineries were built between 1862 and 1868. Drilling tools were needed and several iron works were built. Titusville grew from 250 residents to 10,000 almost overnight and in 1866, it incorporated as a city.
In 1871, the first oil exchange in the United States was established there. The exchange moved from the city, but returned in 1881 in a new, brick building, before being dissolved in 1897.
The first oil millionaire was Jonathan Watson, a resident of Titusville. He owned the land where Drake's well was drilled. He had been a partner in a lumber business prior to the success of the well. At one time it was said that Titusville had more millionaires per 1,000 population than anywhere else in the world.
One resident of note was Franklin S. Tarbell, whose large Italianate home still stands. He first moved a few miles south in Venango County and established a wooden stock tank business. About 16 km south-east of Titusville was another oil boom city, Pithole.
More information: City of Titusville
Oil was discovered in a
rolling meadow there in January 1865 and, by September 1865, the
population was 15,000. But the oil soon ran dry and within four years
the city was nearly deserted. Tarbell moved to Titusville in 1870. His
daughter, Ida Minerva Tarbell, grew up amidst the sounds and smells of
the oil industry. She became an accomplished writer and published a
series of articles about the business practices of the Standard Oil
Company and its president, John D. Rockefeller, which sparked
legislative action in Congress concerning monopolies.
Fire was always a significant concern around oil and one of the worst blazes was on June 11, 1880. It came to be known as Black Friday, when almost 300,000 barrels (48,000 m3) of oil burned after an oil tank was hit by lightning. The fire raged for three days until it finally was brought under control. The destroyed oil was valued at $2 million, but there was no loss of life.
Another fire occurred on June 5, 1892, when Oil Creek flooded and a tank of petroleum ether overturned. The petroleum ether ignited and, in the ensuing explosions, 60 men, women and children died. Another lightning strike in 1894 resulted in 27,000 barrels (4,300,000 liters) of oil being lost in a fire.
Oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891, after which other industries became established in Titusville. The iron and steel industries dominated the town in the early twentieth century, with lumber eventually reclaiming its former pre-eminence.
Oil still has some relevance, however. Charter Plastics, now located in a building that once manufactured pressure vessels, stationary engines and boilers for the oil industry, uses oil in its production processes.
More information: Titusville Pennsylvania
In the 1940s,
the petroleum business was an American game,
and it was enormously to our advantage
that the world ran on oil.
Robert Zubrin
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