Oil as a viable commercial product

Oil as a viable commercial product is perhaps only 150 years old, but small surface occurrences of petroleum in the form of natural gas and oil seeps have been known from ancient times. The ancient Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians used crude oil and asphalt (or "pitch") collected from large seeps at Tuttul on the Euphrates for many purposes more than 5,000 years ago. Liquid oil was first used as a medicine by the ancient Egyptians, it is thought as a wound dressing, liniment, and laxative. Oil products were also valued as weapons of war in the ancient world. The ancient Persians used arrows wrapped in oilsoaked fibers and then set afire at the siege of Athens in 480 B.C.

Early in the Christian era the Arabs and Persians distilled crude oil to obtain flammable products for military purposes. Because of the Arab invasion of Spain, the industrial art of distillation into illuminants became available in western Europe by the 12th century. Several centuries after this, Spanish explorers discovered oil seeps in presentday Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru, and in North America, oil seeps were plentiful. These oil seeps were described by early explorers in what are now New York and Pennsylvania, and the Indians in those regions had reported that they had used the oil for medicinal purposes. Oil as a commercial product started with oil discoveries and production beginning in 1859. In the first 109 years, until 1968, 200,000,000,000 barrels of world oil were produce

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, which has many frontier basins, and both the Middle East and eastern Europe are also thought to contain significant oil prospects (Encyclopedia Britannica Online). The 11 countries which make up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) produce about 41 percent of the world's oil and hold more than 77 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. OPEC also contains nearly all of the world's excess oil production capacity ("OPEC Fact Sheet"). Saudi Arabia is thought to have had the largest original oil endowment of any country. The discovery of the Al-Ghawar field in 1948 transformed Saudi Arabia into a leading oil country, and this field has proved to be the world's largest, containing 82,000,000,000 barrels. Another important discovery was the Saffaniyah offshore field in the Persian Gulf, the third largest oil field in the world and the largest offshore oil field. Saudi Arabia has eight other supergiant oil fields and so has the largest oil reserve in the world, not to mention a significant potential for additional discoveries (Encyclopedia Britannica Online). OPEC was formed at a conference held in Baghdad on September 1014, 1960, and there were five original members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,

Category: Economics - O