|
|
|||||||||||||
|
Please be fair to the author. Pay your Shareware fee HERE, and receive the CD-ROM at no extra cost. |
|||||||||||||
|
A TRUE HISTORY OF OIL AND GAS 800 BCE - 1869 CE
Baku oilfield, around 1850 ==>
Uses of petroleum are mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible. Chinese and Japanese writings that predate the first millennium by as much as 900 years describe the use of natural gas and oil from natural flows, seeps, and hand dug wells. Credit for the first drilled oil well goes to the Chinese in the year 347 BC. Sumerians burned oil in pans for lighting as early as 4500 BC. Oil lamps appeared around 500 BC. A town near Grenoble France had natural gas street lamps in the year 100!! Oil streetlights appeared in Cordoba around 900, London in 1414, and Paris in 1524. Sir Thomas Shirley presented a paper to the Royal Society in 1658 on natural gas flows in Britain. In 1739, V. I. Veitbrecht published an article "About Oil" in the Russian scientific magazine "Primechaniya na Vedomosti" where he described the Baku area oil wells and provided a plan of the oil and gas fields. This may be the first technical paper with a reservoir description. Coal-gas (manufactured gas) dates back to 1726 in England. Oil was extracted from oil sands in Pechelbron France in 1735. Creation of coal-oil by distillation of coal and oil shales occurred between 1781 and 1820 in England, France, and Germany. In 1626 Joseph de la Roche d'Allion, a Jesuit priest from France based at Trois Rivieres in Quebec, reported oil seeps in what is now New York state. Peter Pond was the first non-native to report the discovery of oil in Canada in 1778 at the Athabasca oil sands in northeast Alberta.
<== Dr Abraham Gesner
Baku oilfield, 1846 ==>
<== James Miller Williams There was an Oil Springs and a Petrolia in Pennsylvania too, but these wells came a year later (Edwin Drake, Titusville, 1859). There's a Petrolia in Texas, and another in California, not to mention the park in Baku set up by the Nobel brothers. It gets confusing.
"Colonel" Eswin Drake ==> Drake himself never drilled another well but his discovery started a drilling rush in the area. His derrick burned down a few months later, killing nine men. He became an oil buyer and then a stock broker on Wall Street specializing in, you guessed it, oil stocks. |
|||||||||||||
|
Copyright ©
E. R. (Ross) Crain, P.Eng.
email |
A
Canadian, Dr. Abraham Gesner, developed the distillation of kerosene
from crude oil in 1846. Kerosene helped reduce the use of whale
oil for illumination. Some claim the whale oil problem had already
been overcome by manufactured gas and oil from coal, but the two
events certainly helped the "Save the Whales" campaign.
The Americans give Benjamin Sillian credit for the invention of
kerosene in 1855, but he was at least third in line after Gesner
and a Polish druggist named Ignacy Lukasiewicz (1853). Coal-oil
and kerosene are the same product - just different sources.
Azerbaijan
claims the first drilled well in the modern era at Bibi-Heybat,
a suburb of Baku on the Caspian Sea, in 1846. The first drilled
oil wells in Europe were located near Bucharest in Romania in
1857 but Poland makes the same claim for 1854 at Bobrka.
The
completion of the first commercial oil well in North America occurred
in 1858 at Oil Springs, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada and was
quickly followed by more oil at Petrolia, Ontario. The man's
name was James Miller Williams. This was a hand dug well and the
first drilled wells came in 1862. Some of these flowed up to
7000 barrels per day, often before anyone thought to build a
storage pit or tank. Some of the early oil flowed down creeks to
be wasted in the Great Lakes, but it had been doing that for
eons before, from natural seeps.
It
would appear that Drake's well placed the USA sixth in line in
the sweepstakes for the "first" oil well, after China, Azerbaijan,
Poland, Romania, and Canada. Drake's well, drilled to a depth
of 69.5 feet, pumped oil at the inconsequential rate of 8 to 10
gallons per day. Some historians claim this is the USA's first "commercial"
oil well, but the rate was trivial even by the standards
of the times.