Where does "oil" come from?

In the modern world, people are familiar with petroleum and petroleum products, but they are still interested in the question of who called this important energy source "petroleum" in such a graphic way.

Once upon a time, many peoples around the world have discovered oil through above-ground oil seedlings. In the Middle East, Iraq and Iran, archaeological excavations, people have found belong to the petroleum family of the ground asphalt or asphalt has been used in construction, road building, waterproofing, painting and plugging the seam of the ship records. Ancient oil and gas seedlings have been documented in Echigo, Japan; Pechelbronn, France; Galicia, Spain; Indonesia and Sumatra; as well as in Germany, France, Italy and Russia. Oil has been depicted in collections in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian pyramids, the Mexican Achitecs and in paintings on birch bark.

The Chinese people are also one of the first to recognize and use petroleum. The earliest record of petroleum that has been found in China so far appeared in the Book of Han - Geographical Records, written by the Eastern Han historian Ban Gu (32-92 A.D.). The book reads: "Gaohan, with its river water, is combustible". The "Gaohan" here is the area northeast of Yan'an in northern Shaanxi Province; the "Weishui" is the Qingjian River, which is a tributary of the Yanhe River. "Combustible" means that there are things on the water that can be ignited by fire. This record is nearly two thousand years old. After this, there were even more records about oil in ancient China. During the Western Jin Dynasty, Zhang Hua gave a detailed and objective description of the petroleum in Yanshou County, Jiuquan County in ancient times, from its form, nature to its use, and he called the petroleum "stone lacquer" in his book "Museum Records". Similar accounts were cited or appeared in Fan Ye's Hou Han Shu - County and State Records of the Jin Dynasty, Li Daoyuan's Shui Jing Zhu of the Northern Wei Dynasty, and Li Shizhen's Materia Medica Compendium of the Ming Dynasty.

In the history of human civilization, oil has been called "the devil's sweat beads", "the blood of the Primate", "luminous water" by many countries. In China, in addition to the Western Jin Dynasty, Zhang Hua called petroleum "stone lacquer", the Tang Dynasty Li Jifu in the book "Yuanhe County Atlas" called petroleum "stone fat water". He described in the book: "Yumen County stone fat water, 180 miles southeast of the county, the spring has moss, such as fat meat, burning very bright." China's ancient people also called the oil "naphtha", "fierce fire oil", "andrographis oil" (Figure 20).

Figure 20 Ancient Chinese laborers drilling wells to extract oil and natural gas

The word "petroleum" was first used in the Northern Song Dynasty. Many people now believe that Shen Kuo (1031-1095 A.D.) of the Song Dynasty first proposed and used the name. According to the evidence, Shen Kuo in his later years, around 1090 A.D., wrote "Mengxi Bianan" (Volume 24), not only used the word "oil", but also described the state of petroleum, uses, etc., which is very valuable to science (Figure 21). In fact, the term "petroleum" had already appeared in the Taiping Guangji (太平广记) compiled by the literati Li Fang (925-996 A.D.) and others before this time: "The petroleum wells are located in the north of Yanchang County (延长县),90里, and the wells produce petroleum, which is extracted from the wells by using the tail of a pheasant to scoop up the petroleum into a jar (雉尾挹), and then collecting it into a jar. (meaning yì, scoop, draw), picking into the jar, burning like hemp, more soot, for the ink pheasant, more treatment of disease." The compilation of Taiping Guangji began in the second year of Taiping Xingguo (977 A.D.) and ended in the sixth year of Taiping Xingguo (981 A.D.), and Shen Kuo was born 50 years after the book was written, while his Mengxi Bianan was written more than 100 years after Taiping Guangji was written. Therefore, the first person to name "petroleum" was Li Fang in the Northern Song Dynasty.

Figure 21 Shen Kuo (Northern Song Dynasty), "Mengxi Bianan - Oil Article"

Although human beings have a long history of discovering petroleum, effective exploration, development, and utilization of petroleum were impossible due to the fact that scientific and technological development was still very undeveloped. It was only from the 1850s that the modern petroleum industry slowly developed. But at that time, kerosene was only refined from petroleum and used to light lamps, and kerosene lamps used to be the most fashionable and brightest lamps in the world at that time. Gasoline, which is lighter than kerosene, was burned in vain because it burned and exploded easily, and this period was called the "kerosene era.

The advent of the internal combustion engine in 1878 and the automobile in 1885 required large amounts of gasoline. Subsequently, motorcycles, airplanes, and motorboats also required large amounts of gasoline. This makes the gasoline that was burned in large quantities before come in handy, and also in large quantities, forcing people to increase the search for oil, improve the level of gasoline refining, which strongly promotes the development of the petroleum industry.

Since 1940, especially after the Second World War, the rapid development of jet technology, so that mankind into the aerospace age, the jet engine to replace the internal combustion engine, aviation kerosene instead of aviation gasoline, compression ignition diesel engine, a large number of use of all kinds of fuel oil, lubricating oil, the quantity and quality of the requirements of a great increase. The 20th century can be said to be the golden age of the petroleum industry, not only its own brilliant development, but also made a great contribution to the modern civilization of mankind.

It is generally believed that the modern petroleum industry started from the first oil well drilled by American E.L. Drake in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the oil production of the United States has been ranked the first in the world in the following 90 years, accounting for about 50% to 70% of the world's total oil production in that period. Russia began oil production in 1863 during the tsarist era, and after the October Revolution, it quickly grew into a major oil-producing country in the world due to its abundant hydrocarbon resources and high level of industrialization. The exploration and development of the world's marine oil was started in 1890 in the United States off the coast of California.

China's first oil well was in 1873 by the then Manchu government from the United States hired technicians and bought a drilling rig in China's Taiwan, Miaoli out of the sulfur pits drilled to a depth of only 133.8 meters, at about 90 meters to see the oil flow, 750 kilograms of oil per day. The first oil well in China's mainland area was drilled in 1907 at the Yanchang oil mine in Shaanxi Province, and is still producing oil today (Figure 22).

Figure 22 The first oil well in China's mainland area