Lesson 1 How It All BeganOil.Petroleum.Black gold.Formed under the surface of the earth millions of years ago, man has long been aware of the existence of oil. Yet, it has only been in the last hundred years or so that man has fully realized its value and usefulness. In hardly more than a century, our modern society has become totally dependent upon the men and women and dreams and realities of the petroleum industry. Today we depend upon petroleum products not only for transportation, heating, and generating electricity, but also for fertilizers and fabrics, plastics and pantyhose. munitions and medicines, paints and pesticides, and thousands of other items we take for granted every day.Other fuels, such as coal and uranium, would not be available without the diesel fuel and petroleum-based explosives required to mine, transport, and process them, or the billions of cubic feet of natural gas necessary to manufacture the Portland cement needed to build the generating stations they fuel. In short, as the past decade has painfully taught us, the world’s economy is based not on gold or political philosophies, but rather on the price of a barrel of crude.Man first became acquainted with petroleum through natural “seeps,” or spots on the earth’s surface where shallow deposits of crude oil—and often natural gas—oozed upwards into pits, creeks, and marshes, or along beaches and bays. Petroleum, as the “rock oil”, was called by the ancients, is referred to not only in the Bible, but also in man’s earliest recorded history. Oil seeps and bitumen pits furnished the pitch and asphalt used in the mortar that built the Tower of Babel, the walls of Ninevah, and Solomon’s temple. It was from ...
