Invention

Part 1 - Crude Oil

You can find all books in the series at https://www.wattpad.com/user/duncmacphun

Thank you for reading, voting, following and adding, 'WEALTH' to your reading list or library. Dunc MacPhun 2022 March 25.

Beginning about 2.4 billion years ago, the newly evolved cyanobacteria were combining carbon with hydrogen and radically changed the course of evolution. 

They got the carbon from carbon dioxide dissolved in the water of the shallow seas where they had evolved and split the hydrogen from the water using the sun's radiation as a power source. This activity released a gas, poisonous to all life on Earth at that time, into the atmosphere . . . oxygen. 

The bacteria combined the carbon and hydrogen to make the complex molecules they needed to multiply and, as they had little competition, the population grew exponentially larger. Over millions of years enormous numbers of dead bacteria sank to the bottom of shallow seas creating layer upon layer of deposits rich in carbon and hydrogen. These were slowly buried under layers of sediment that eventually were compressed into rock. Over time, repeatedly heated, cooled and compressed by tectonic movement and volcanic activity some of the hydro-carbons became stored in porous rocks or formed underground pools of liquid oils, tars and gases some of which found its way to the surface as oil springs.

The earliest record of people using crude oil comes from Mesopotamia (Iraq) more than 4000 years ago, when pitch was used to build he walls of Babylon. (Pitch is a naturally occurring asphalt/bitumen fluid that flows so slowly that appears to be a solid at room temperature).

Herodotus (484 to 425 BCE) mentioned a pitch spring on Zacynthus (Greece) and bitumen and oil wells near Ardericca (Iran). Greek fire, probably using naptha distilled from crude oil, was later used to set enemy ships on fire. The Chinese discovered natural gas about 600 BCE while drilling through rock searching for water. Before 347 CE, they used the same hammer drilling technique to extract natural gas from wells up to 800 feet (240 m) deep.

Arabic and Persian chemists like Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) knew how to distill kerosene (paraffin) from crude oil and how to use flammable products for military purposes. In the 9th century CE, oil was extracted near Baku, Azerbaijan and in the 13th century, Marco Polo described the output of the Baku wells as hundreds of shiploads.

Sir Walter Raleigh used the 'excellent' pitch from the lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad to caulk his ships, in 1595. In 1632 Joseph de la Roche d'Allion described the oil springs of New York and, in 1753, Peter Kalm, published a map of the oil springs in Pennsylvania.

In 1719, Swiss physician Eirini d'Eyrinys established a bitumen mine at Val-de-Travers and in 1745, the first refinery was built in Ukhta by Fiodor Priadunov. By distilling the "rock oil" (petr-oleum) he obtained kerosene which was used for oil lamps in Russian churches.

In Alsace, France, oil sands were mined from 1745 by Louis Pierre Ancillon de la Sablonnière. A refinery was built 1857 and the Pechelbronn oil field remained active until 1970. The companies Antar and Schlumberger were founded there.

In 1847, the Scottish chemist James Young distilled kerosene (paraffin) from a natural petroleum seepage in a coal mine in Derbyshire (Britain). The kerosene replaced the use of whale oil in lamps. In 1850, he founded a oil refinery using locally mined coal to manufacture naphtha, kerosene (paraffin), solid paraffin wax and lubricating oils. 

In 1850, Abraham Pineo Gesner, developed a process of refining liquid fuel from coal, bitumen and oil shale and formed the Kerosene Gaslight Company in Canada. This burned more cleanly and was less expensive than whale oil. He installed gas street lighting in several Canadian cities and, by 1854, he expanded into the United States until the discovery of petroleum, from which kerosene could be more cheaply, made his process uneconomic.

Ignacy Łukasiewicz improved Gesner's method of refining kerosene from the more readily available "rock oil" ("petr-oleum") seeps, in 1852, and the first rock oil mine was built near Krosno in Poland in 1854. 

In 1846, Russian Major Alekseev and N. Voskoboynikov dug an oil well near Baku and, in 1861, built a modern refinery. For a time, Baku produced about 90% of the world's oil.

Hand dug wells produced seven tons of oil a day for the Rafov Refinery, at Ploiesti, Romania, in 1857, and Bucharest became the first city in the world illuminated entirely with distilled crude oil.