Oil is one of the representatives of the class of liquid minerals (in addition to it, it also includes artesian water). It got its name from the Persian "oil". Together with ozokerite and natural gas, it forms a group of minerals called petrolites.
WHAT IS OIL FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
It is a greasy, oily substance, the color and density of which varies depending on the place of extraction. It can be bright green or cherry red, yellow, brown, black, and in rare cases, colorless. The fluidity of oil also varies greatly: one will be like water, the other will be viscous. But what makes the substances so different in physical properties related to each other is their chemical composition, which is always a complex mixture of hydrocarbons. For other properties, impurities are responsible - sulfur, nitrogen and other compounds, of which the smell depends mainly on the presence of aromatic hydrocarbons and sulfur compounds.
The name of the main component - “hydrocarbons” exhaustively speaks of its composition. These are substances consisting of carbon and hydrogen atoms, whose general formula is written as SkHNu. The simplest representative of this series is methane CH4, which is present in any oil.
The elemental composition of the average oil can be represented as a percentage:
- 84% carbon
- 14% hydrogen
- 1-3% sulfur
- <1% oxygen
- <1% metals
- <1% salts
OIL AND GAS FEATURES
Oil and gas are usually fellow travelers, that is, they are found together, but this only happens with a depth of 1 to 6 kilometers. Most fields are in this range, and the combination of oil and gas are different. If the depth is less than a kilometer, then one oil is found there, and over 6 kilometers - only gas.
The reservoir where the oil is found is called a reservoir. Typically, these are porous rocks that can be likened to a hard sponge that collects and holds oil, gas, and other moving fluids (for example, water). Another prerequisite for the accumulation of oil is the presence of a reservoir layer, which prevents the further movement of the fluid, which is why it is locked in a trap. Geologists are looking for such traps, which are then called deposits, but this is not quite the right name. Because oil or gas originated much lower in layers under high pressure. They fall into the upper layers due to the fact that, being light fluids, they tend upward. They are literally squeezed to the surface of the earth.
WHERE AND WHEN OIL WAS BORN
To understand the mechanism of oil formation, you need to travel mentally millions of years ago. According to the biogenic theory (it is also the theory of organic origin), starting from the Carboniferous period (350 million years BC) and up to the middle of the Paleogene (50 million years BC), numerous areas of shallow water became places of accumulation of organic remains life - dying microorganisms and algae fell to the bottom, forming the bottom layers of organics. Very slowly, these layers were closed by other, inorganic - sand deposits, for example, and sank lower and lower. The pressure increased, the closing layers solidified, there was no access of oxygen to the organics. In the darkness, under the influence of pressure and temperature, the remains were transformed into simple hydrocarbons, some of which became gaseous, and some became liquid and solid.
As soon as the fluids were given the opportunity to break out of the parent layer, they rushed up until they were trapped. True, the climb also took a lot of time. In traps, fluids are usually distributed as follows: gas on top, then oil, and water at the very bottom. This is due to the density of each of them. If there was no impenetrable layer on the fluid path, they appeared on the surface where they were destroyed and scattered. The natural outcrops of oil to the surface are usually a pool of thick malt and semi-liquid asphalt, or it impregnates sand, forming the so-called tar sands.
HUMAN OIL HISTORY
The emergence of oil to the surface could not fail to attract the attention of an ancient man. There is practically no information about the earliest stages of acquaintance, but during a period of well-developed material culture, oil was used in construction - this is evidenced by data from Iraq, where evidence is found of using oil to protect homes from moisture. Flammability of oil was discovered in Egypt, and it was used for lighting. In addition, she found application in mummification and as a sealant for boats.
Being rare, oil became a valuable commodity already in antiquity: the Babylonians traded it in the Middle East. It is assumed that it was this trade that spawned many cities and villages. It is also possible that oil was used to create one of the famous "wonders of the world" - the hanging gardens of Babylon. There she came in handy as a sealant that does not allow water to pass through.
The Chinese were the first to be dissatisfied with the sources emerging on the surface. They invented the drilling of wells using hollow bamboo trunks with a metal “drill” at the end. At first they looked for salt sources for salt extraction, but then they found oil and gas. With the help of the latter, they evaporated salt - burning it. There is no data on the use of oil in China at that time.
Another ancient way to use oil was her treatment of skin diseases. A similar practice among the inhabitants of the Absheron peninsula is mentioned in the notes of Marco Polo.
Oil was first mentioned in Russia only in the 15th century. Historians have found mention of the collection of crude oil on the Ukhta River, where it formed a film on the surface of the water. There they collected it and made it a medicine or a light source - usually it was impregnation for torches.
A new use of oil was found only in the 19th century, when the kerosene lamp was invented. It was developed by the Polish chemist Ignatius Lukasevich. It is possible that he was also the inventor of a method for extracting kerosene from oil. A few years earlier, Canadian Abraham Gesner came up with a way to get kerosene from coal, but getting from oil turned out to be more profitable.
Kerosene was actively used for lighting, so the demand for it was constantly growing. Therefore, it was necessary to solve the issue of its production. The start of the oil industry was laid in 1847 in Baku, where the first well that produced oil was drilled. Soon, there were so many wells that Baku was called the Black City.
But those wells were still drilled manually. The first well, drilled by a steam engine that set in motion a drilling rig, appeared in Russia in 1864 in the Kuban region. Two years later, the Kudakinskoye field completed the mechanical drilling of another well.
In the world, the beginning of industrial oil production was laid in 1859 by Edwin Drake, who drilled the first oil well in the USA on August 27 this year - it had a depth of 21.2 meters and was located in the town of Titusville in Pennsylvania, where it used to be when drilling artesian wells found oil.
Drilling oil wells dramatically reduced the cost of oil production and led to the fact that soon this product became the most important for modern civilization. At the same time, this marked the beginning of the development of the oil industry.
OIL APPLICATION
At present, we no longer use pure oil. However, there are many products of its processing, without which our world is unthinkable. After the first distillation, five types of fuel are obtained:
- aviation and automobile gasoline
- kerosene
- rocket fuel
- diesel fuel
- gas
- fuel oil
The fuel oil fraction is the source of another series of further distillation products:
- bitumen
- paraffin
- oils
- boiler fuel
The further fate of bitumen is its combination with gravel and sand to produce asphalt. Another oil product that is also used for road works is tar, which is a concentrate of oil residues after its distillation. Another residue, petroleum coke, is used in the manufacture of ferroalloys and electrodes.
The chemical industry uses simple hydrocarbons as raw materials for reactions that alter the formula of compounds. The result is plastics, rubbers, fabrics, fertilizers, dyes, polyethylene and polypropylene, as well as many household chemicals.
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