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1、Part I Before DrillingLesson 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
2、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
3、 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 o
4、f 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 worlds economy is based not on gold or political philosophies, but rather on the price of a barrel of crude.Man first
5、became acquainted with petroleum through natural “seeps,” or spots on the earths surface where shallow deposits of crude oiland often natural gasoozed 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
6、in the Bible, but also in mans 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 Solomons temple. It was from “slime pits” near the Dead Sea, that the Egyptians obtained the bitumen they u
7、sed to embalm their dead. In 3000 B.C. the Sumerians were using oil-burning lamps, a practice adopted in Greece around 250 B.C. In the East, sometime after 100 B.C., the Chinese were digging wells hundreds of feet deep to obtain salt water from which they extracted the sodium chloride to season and
8、preserve their food. Occasionally these wells also produced natural gas, which the Chinese learned to use not only for heating and cooking, but also to pipe through bamboo tubes and burn to heat the well water to hasten its evaporation.By 615 A.D., the Japanese were digging wells nearly 1,000 ft dee
9、p in attempts to obtain “burning water,” a practice which was also occurring in Burma and India at about the same time. And, along the banks of the Caspian Sea, men were digging shallow wells by hand to obtain oil to light their lamps. As man found more and more of this strange substance, he slowly
10、began to learn that it could be used in many ways. In 671 A.D., Kallinikos of Byzantium invented a primitive missile which he called Greek Fire. which carried an incendiary payload composed of petroleum, sulfur. resin, and rock salt, which the Greeks used against their enemies, the Arabs, during the
11、 siege of Constantinople. The Greeks also used petroleum in war at sea, pouring it on the water and igniting it, a fearsome weapon against wooden ships. Even earlier, the legionnaires of ancient Rome won a battle by setting oil-soaked pigs aflame and driving them into the ranks of the approaching en
12、emy.Gradually, the use of petroleum began to spread across parts of Asia and Europe. But, in order for any new industry to come about, three factors must be present: a widely demonstrated need for the product provided, a reliable and economical source of supply, and an established market price that
13、would guarantee a return on investment sufficient to overcome the risks inherent in any new venture. Thus, the time was not yet right for the birth of the worldwide petroleum industry, and it would not be until the Europeans ventured west that the sleeping giant would begin to awaken.1.1 The New Wor
14、ldWhen the first explorers ventured into the New World, they found petroleum marshes as well as huge asphalt pools in Trinidad, Venezuela, and later, in California. As more and more adventurers made the long voyage across the Atlantic, they learned to come to these places, beach their sea-weary ship
15、s and caulk their leaks with boiled-down petroleum residues. Not only did this seal the hulls, it also protected them against teredos, small, worm-like marine mollusks that inhabit tropical waters and bore into wooden ships, destroying them. In the years to come, this practice of ship coating would
16、grow into an industry of its own and create one of the first economic demands for petroleum products.1.1.1 Latin AmericaThe Indians in what is now Mexico, called this tarry substance Chapapote, while in Venezuela and other parts of South America it was called Mene. The pre-Colombian peoples used chapapote or menewhich had worked its way to the earths surfaceas medicine in the form of liniments and ointments, to coat footwear, boats, and roofing, as glue
