Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Forvarioustechnicalreasons,progressinbatterytechnologyisextremelyslow—electriccarshavebeen
around longer than gasoline-powered cars—and it may well be that another, nonbattery storage solution
will win out. For now, though, oil is the greatest portable fuel the world has ever known, and we are will-
ing to pay a premium for it; per unit of energy, we sometimes pay five times as much for oil as for natural
gas.
Oil is also coveted as the world's most versatile raw material for making synthetic materials. You are
probably sitting in a room with at least fifty things derived from oil, from the insulation in your wall to
the carpet under your feet to the laminate on your table to the screen on your computer. Oil is every-
where—that is how the average American uses 2.5 gallons each day.
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Like coal and gas, there is enormous future potential for oil production—if the industry can keep devel-
oping better technologies. The shale energy revolution is bringing supplies some never expected, and the
Earth still contains many times more oil than we have used in the entire history of civilization.
FUTURE ENERGY RESOURCES
Here's a trick question I like to ask when I do public speaking: “Is oil a valuable natural resource?” Almost
everyone answers yes, even when I tell them it's a trick question.
My answer is no. Because oil—or coal, or natural gas, or uranium, or aluminum for that matter—is not
naturally a resource
.
If we understand this, we understand why we can be incredibly optimistic about the future potential of
fossil fuels and future sources of energy.
A resource is something that's available and usable for human benefit. I'll focus on oil here because
that is the resource that people most fear will disappear.
Before the 1850s, oil was not a resource—it was naturally useless. It was a distinct
raw material,
to be
sure, with the potential to become valuable, just as sand has the potential to become a microchip. But oil
had very little use; in fact, in many cases, it was a nuisance. Drillers seeking underground saltwater depos-
its to distill into salt were annoyed by the presence of this “rock oil.”
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Additionally, oil was not a resource
because it was hidden and trapped, invisible and inaccessible.
What turned oil from a potential resource to an actual resource was human ingenuity—the ingenuity of
the chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr., who refined petroleum into kerosene, the ingenuity of George Bissell,
who targeted Titusville, Pennsylvania, as a location likely to have underground oil, and the ingenuity of
Edwin Drake, who created the first successful oil well in 1859 at 69.5 feet underground.
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It was only thanks to their ingenuity that useless goo became a resource.
The history of oil is a history of
resource creation
. For example, crude oil, through a process of boiling
(distilling), could be refined into 50 or 60 percent kerosene, used for lighting. But then the rest of the crude
oil wasn't a resource—it was often pure waste, dumped in a lake—until human ingenuity made it so. In the
nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil progressively figured out how to create value out
of every “fraction” of a barrel—a barrel containing numerous types of hydrocarbons of different shapes,
sizes, and masses. They created wax out of one part of the barrel, lubricants (over three hundred varieties)
out of another, and asphalt out of another.
In the twentieth century, modern chemistry made oil not only the most important fuel, but also the most
important raw material in civilization. Chemists can “crack”—break down—the molecules in a barrel of
