Petroleum 1: How oil becomes oil.

Oil, natural gas and petroleum have been foremost on people’s minds for the past several months. In the United States we have cringed as gasoline prices have soared to amounts not seen since the 1970’s. During this past winter, many people dreaded the receipt of their monthly gas bill as the price of natural gas climbed. The debate being waged in the United States Congress and in every other forum has centered on a possible looming energy crisis and the need for the United States to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. The proposals being put forward by the Bush Administration is for the opening up of federal lands to more exploration for oil and gas. At the heart of this debate is the proposal to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to exploratory drilling.

Ours is a nation, and a world, that is run by oil. It fuels our cars, our homes and provides us with electricity. It is used in the making of plastics and cosmetics. Oil is so prevalent in our lives, but most people don’t know where the oil we use comes from (except to say the corner gas station). With all the current concern and debate over oil, our need for it, how we should conserve it, and where we need to drill to find it, I thought I would take a few articles to cover petroleum and how it is formed and how it is recovered from the ground. In this first article I will cover the basics of how petroleum becomes what it is.

Petroleum (literally rock oil, from the Greek petra- for rock and Latin -oleum for oil) is a general term used to refer to all forms of oil and natural gas that is mined from the earth. What most people concern them selves with is crude oil, the liquid mixture of naturally occurring hydrocarbons, and natural gas, which is a gaseous mixture of naturally occurring hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are complex molecules that are formed from long strings of hydrogen and carbon, such as propane (C₃H₈) or butane (C₄H₁₀).

Petroleum is the final product that we get out of the ground. But how does it get there? Petroleum begins as living animals, microscopic organisms (like diatoms or plankton) that live in the oceans. When these organisms die, their bodies sink and collect on the ocean floor. These organisms live all over the oceans, and their bodies fall and collect on the ocean bottoms all over the world. When the organic matter becomes buried and begin to decompose, they are referred to as kerogen. Despite the apparent abundance of dead organisms raining down on the ocean bottoms, there are specific conditions that must be met for these organisms to be transformed into petroleum.

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