Well written, from a highly organized, evidence-based mind. I now know why Bill Gates' such a fan! We used to be taught that oil is formed from old sea marine plants and animals, but it is interesting to learn that Russian– Ukrainian school of petroleum geology that sees hydrocarbons as abiogenic products, formed under high pressures and temperatures deep in the Earth’s mantle from which they rise to be trapped in porous structures near the planet’s surface. This is not the main-stream science, but mainstream means nothing in science. Truth is much more complex and perplexing than we think!
BTW, the part on building big rigs is very boring (for me) so I totally skip this whole chapter.
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Notes from the book:
New fuels were superior to coal in every respect: they had higher heat content (releasing more energy per unit mass when burned), were easier and safer to produce, cleaner and more convenient to burn and offered an incomparable flexibility of final uses.
gasoline was an inconvenient by- product of kerosene refining, too volatile and too flammable to be used for household lighting or heating, and there were no suitable small furnaces that could burn heavy oil for space heating.
Diesel engines work at a higher pressure and lower speed, and large stationary machines have best efficiencies just above 50% and automotive engines can approach 40%. Gasoline engines used to be 20– 30% less efficient but their best new designs have almost closed the gap. Diesel fuel has other advantages: it contains about 11% more energy than gasoline in the same volume, it is slightly cheaper than gasoline and it is not dangerously flammable.
Conversion to diesel accelerated after 1950 and today about nine out of ten freight ships are propelled by them, including the world’s largest crude oil tankers and container vessels.
The machines can burn both liquid and gaseous fuels, the proper technical name for jet engines burning kerosene is gas turbines.
In jet engines the compression of air precedes the addition of fuel in a combustor, the combustion goes on continuously rather than intermittently, and the energy of the hot air flow is extracted by a turbine that is connected to the compressor by a shaft.
kerosene is 47% of the take- off weight of the Boeing 777– 200LR, currently the passenger aeroplane with the longest- range; on a trans- oceanic flight nearly 45% (about 175t) of a Boeing 747 is kerosene and at cruising altitude (typically 10– 12km above sea level) the aircraft’s four engines consume about 3.2kg (roughly 4l) of the fuel every second.
Nearly two- thirds of the world’s refined products are now used in transportation (roughly 2.5Gt in 2005)
Transportation’s dependence on liquid fuels is even higher: in 2015 about 93% of all energy used by road vehicles, trains, ships and planes came from crude oil.
The four universal measures that revolutionized traditional agriculture are the mechanization of field and crop processing tasks energized by engines and motors; the use of inorganic fertilizers, above all of synthetic nitrogen compounds; applications of agrochemicals to combat pests and weeds; and the development of new high- yielding crop varieties.
Worldwide, about 8% of all refined fuels were consumed by the residential and commercial sectors in 2015, overwhelmingly for heating; again, this share will continue to decline as natural gas takes over.
There are two major kinds of these feedstocks, olefins (mainly ethylene and propylene) and aromatics (mainly benzene, toluene and xylene).
Ethylene, produced by steam cracking of ethane or naphtha, is the most important petrochemical feedstock:
Polymerization of basic feedstocks produces the now ubiquitous thermoplastics that account for more than 70% of all man- made polymers. Thermoplastics are made up of linear or branched molecules that are softened by heating but harden again when cooled.
The second most voluminous non- fuel use of a refined petroleum product is asphalt.Indeed, asphalt, not aluminum cans or newspapers, is the most massively recycled material in affluent countries. Asphalt is also used in roofing, industrial coatings, adhesives and in batteries.
In 2016 (when the average oil price was $ 43/ b) global sales of crude oil were worth just over $ 1.5 trillion. This was equal to 2% of the world’s economic product of about $ 75 trillion, a bit less than the GDP of Canada and almost equal to Russia’s GDP. But in the Netherlands in 2017 a barrel of gasoline was five times more expensive than a barrel of crude oil, with multiples ranging from less than 4.5 in the UK to about 3.5 in Japan, and to less than 2 in the US.
Despite world oil prices remaining relatively low, in 2016 five of the world’s ten largest publicly listed companies (by annual revenue) were in the oil business: Combined revenues of these five companies reached about $ 1.3 trillion in 2016, surpassing the nominal annual GDP of Russia in that year. But in 2014, when the average world oil price was close to $ 100/ barrel, the combined revenue of these five companies was nearly $ 2.1 trillion.
The US has been an exception: with federal and state taxes on gasoline amounting to 21% in 2016, the unit price of that fuel is mostly the cost of crude oil (about 43% in 2015) and the industry margin (about 36%).
As a result, the taxes collected on liquid fuels by the world’s seven largest economies (G7) have surpassed the annual oil revenue of the 13 OPEC nations combined.
The first infamous, and successful, attempt to do so was the establishment of Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870. The Rockefeller brothers (John D. and William) and their partners used secretive acquisitions and deals with railroad companies to gain the control of oil markets first in Cleveland, then in the Northeast, and eventually throughout the US. After this informal oligopoly was joined by Gulf and Texaco it became widely known as the Seven Sisters
In 1960 the Seven Sisters produced more than 60% of the world’s oil, but by 1980 that share had fallen to about 28%, and in 2016 it had declined further to only about 13%. As of 2017 OPEC had 14 members. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and Venezuela were the founding nations.
The first step for the new organization was to protect its revenues: all the early OPEC members agreed not to tolerate any further reductions of posted prices, and income tax became an excise tax.
It must be realized that not only small changes in the global supply or demand, but their mere anticipation, can bring disproportionately large price moves and that there is no simple correlation between the two trends. In 1980 crude oil prices rose by 51% (driven by the takeover of Iran by fundamentalist mullahs) even though consumption fell by 4%. In 1986 consumption rose by 3% as prices fell by 46%; similarly, in 2009, consumption fell by nearly 2% but prices declined by 38%; and in 2015, consumption rose by nearly 2% but the price declined by 30%, with the rising US output, propelled by shale oil, creating fears of enormous supply gluts. For more than three decades a key reason for price over- reaction to small supply or demand moves was the minimal safety cushion created by OPEC: its production in 2003 was just 1% higher than in 1973, the year of the first round of oil price increases.
One of the most revealing international comparisons is the Human Development Index (HDI) that is made up of three major components: life expectancy at birth; adult literacy rate and combined gross enrolment ratio in primary to tertiary education; and GDP per capita expressed in terms of purchasing power parity.
Russian– Ukrainian school of petroleum geology that sees hydrocarbons as abiogenic products, formed under high pressures and temperatures deep in the Earth’s mantle from which they rise to be trapped in porous structures near the planet’s surface.
Ultimate elemental analysis of crude oils shows carbon accounting for about 85% (83– 87%) of their mass, and hydrogen for 13% (11– 15%), with hydrogen- to- carbon ratios around 1.8, compared to about 0.8 for bituminous coals and 4 for methane.
Scientific names of these series are alkanes, cycloalkanes, and arenes but in the oil industry they are known as paraffins, cycloparaffins (or naphthenes) and aromatics.
Alkanes are the second most abundant homologous series found in crude oils, making up about a quarter of the total mass. Their common name, paraffins (from Latin parum affinis, of slight affinity), refers to their inert nature: they do not react with either strong acids or alkaline (or oxygenating) compounds.
(normal) or branched- chain molecules; the first group has some sixty members, the other runs theoretically into millions. The two lightest straight- chained alkanes, methane and ethane, are gases at atmospheric pressure. Propane and butane are also gases but are easily compressible to liquids (hence known as liquid petroleum gases, LPGs). Chains with five (pentane) to sixteen carbons are liquids, and the remainder are solids. Pentane, hexane and heptane are normally the most abundant alkanes in crude oils.
Natural gas liquids (NGLs) are hydrocarbons of low molecular weight that are dissolved in natural gas (be it associated with oil or in non- associated reservoirs) and that get separated from the gas at special processing facilities: they include ethane, propane, butane and isobutene (LPGs) and gas condensate, that is, alkanes containing two to eight carbon atoms (C2H6 to C8H18).
Cycloalkanes (naphthenes in the oil industry) are the most abundant compounds in crude oil (typically half of the weight), with methylcyclopentane and methylcyclohexane present in the greatest quantities. These saturated hydrocarbons have carbon atoms joined in rings of five (cyclopentane) or six (cyclohexane) atoms which tend to fuse into polycyclic molecules in heavier fractions: bicyclic naphthenes are common in kerosene, tetracyclic and pentacyclic compounds are present in lubricating oil.
Arenes (aromatics) are unsaturated, highly reactive liquids named after the members with pleasant odors that share at least one benzene ring to which are attached long, straight side chains. Benzene is the first compound of this series and it is present together with its alkyl derivatives (toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene). Polycyclic aromatics (naphthalenes, anthracene and phenanthrene) are most common in heavy oils and lubricants and they make up less than 20% of crude oil mass.
Oils with high paraffin content have elevated pour points. While light crude oils can flow at temperatures as low as -50 ° C (and commonly at less than -20 ° C), some high- paraffin crudes will gel even at 40 ° C, and even those with pour points above freezing point may have to be heated before they can be transported in pipelines in cold climates, or special additives must be used to lower their viscosity.
International energy statistics usually use 42MJ/ kg (or 42GJ/ t) as the typical value when converting fossil fuels to a common energy denominator.
This means that the energy density of crude oils is about 50% higher than that of the best anthracite coals (29– 30MJ/ kg), about twice as high as that of common steam coals (20– 24MJ/ kg) used for electricity generation.
The already noted higher hydrogen/ carbon (H/ C) ratio of crude oil means the combustion of refined products generates 20– 25% less carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, per unit of energy than coal.
Although the sulfur content of some crude oils is high, refined products contain much less sulfur than coal and their combustion yields much less sulfur dioxide, the gas most responsible for acidifying deposition (acid rain).
And, unlike the burning of coal, combustion of liquid fuels produces only trace amounts of particulate matter.
All coals were formed through the accumulation and transformation of plant mass (phytomass),
Often, exquisitely preserved imprints of leaves and fossilized twigs, branches and trunks offer abundant testimonies of this origin.
Modern consensus among petroleum geologists and geochemists is that oils of inorganic origin are commercially unimportant and that crude oils are derived from dead biomass, from organic compounds formed mostly by monocellular phytoplankton (dominated by cyanobacteria and diatoms) and zooplankton (above all by foraminifera) as well as by higher aquatic plants (algae), invertebrates and fish. In oil the ratio of two stable isotopes, 13C and the dominant 12C, resembles that of plants (photosynthesis preferentially selects the lighter isotope) and not that of carbonate rocks.
Roughly 1,000 times more ancient biomass was needed to transfer a unit of carbon from organic matter to crude oil than was required to preserve it in coal.
Coal formation has high carbon preservation rates. Close to 15% of the element is transferred from plants to peat and 75– 95% of that carbon ends up as coal. Underground coal mining usually removes about 50% of coal in place and surface mining takes out as much as 90%. The overall carbon recovery factor (the percentage of the element’s original presence in phytomass that ends up in marketable fuel) is thus as high as 20% for lignites and as low as 2% for the best anthracites, with rates around 10% being typical for the most commonly mined bituminous coals. Obversely, this means that 5– 50 units of carbon locked in ancient plant mass were needed to produce one unit of carbon in coal.
In comparison to coal formation, preservation factors of carbon were lower during the formation of marine and lake sediments (rarely over 10%, often less than 1%), and much lower during the subsequent heating and pressurization of organic sediments. Published data also indicate a much wider range of preservation factors and crude oil also has much lower extraction factors than coal: commonly just 10– 20% of all carbon originally present in oil formations ends up on the market. This means that the mean overall recovery factor for crude oil carbon is less than 0.01%. On the average, some 10,000 units of carbon (or as few as about 100 and as many as 300,000 or more) in the initially sequestered biomass were needed to produce a unit of carbon in marketed crude oil.
Every liter of gasoline (about 740g containing about 640g of carbon) represents some 25t of originally sequestered marine biomass.
Commercial viability of oil deposits is determined by the great trinity of hydrocarbon geology, the right combination of a rich source rock, a permeable and porous reservoir rock and a suitable tight trap to hold the liquid in place.
Instead, a reservoir is any subsurface body of rock whose porosity and permeability are sufficient to store and to transmit fluids so they are eventually able to flow into a borehole.
3 How oil is found and where it has been discovered
2018 the top five countries on this list were (with shares of the world’s conventional oil reserves, rounded to the nearest percent in parentheses) Saudi Arabia (20), Iran (12), Iraq (11) and Russia and Kuwait (each with nearly 8% of the total).
The global reserve/ production (R/ P) ratio, a quotient of the latest available reserve estimate and annual oil extraction.
External energy is needed to lift the fluid in a well bore. This has been done using rod pumps, electrical submersible pumps and also by gas lift.
As already explained, horizontal drilling became a widely adopted commercial practice by the 1990s– and so was hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. Its distant precursor was oil- well ‘shooting’ (using nitroglycerin to shatter rocks) that was practiced during the early decades of American oil extraction to boost oil flow.
Fracking fluid is about 90% water. Most of the rest is sand, and additives (hundreds of substances have been tried) usually make up less than 0.5% of the volume but they contain a mix of chemicals (acids, corrosion inhibitors, gelling agents, surfactants, biocides) that should never be allowed to contaminate drinking water.
First, there is no doubt that outside of the Middle East the oil industry has been experiencing a secular decline of its EROEI. However, even the latest, historically low, rates compare favorably with the energy cost of many fossil and non- fossil alternatives.
The preference for pipelines as principal long- distance carriers of oil is above all a matter of logistics and cost.
Oil is pushed through pipelines by centrifugal pumps powered by electric motors, diesel engines or gas turbines that are located at the origin of a line and then at intervals of 30– 160km (depending on the terrain crossed by the line and its throughput).
vessels). A limited number of ports of call makes the use of ultra large tankers less flexible, and because of their deep draft supertankers must also follow restricted routes in near- shore waters or channels and they require very long distances while maneuvering and stopping.
All early refineries relied on simple thermal distillation, using heat delivered as high- pressure steam in order to separate crude oils into their principal fractions.
the first catalytic cracking process that became commercially available by 1923: crude oil was heated in the presence of aluminum chloride, a compound able to break long- chained hydrocarbon molecules into shorter, more volatile compounds, and gasoline yield was as much as 15% higher compared to thermal cracking. Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) takes place in a reactor under high temperature (540 ° C) in less than four seconds. Zeolites are crystalline aluminosilicates whose uniformly porous structure provides an exceptionally active and stable catalyst, improving the gasoline yield by as much as 15%. The process starts with desalting that removes not only inorganic salts (whose presence would corrode the refinery pipes, units and heat exc