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Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications)
Oil: A Beginner's Guide
Packed with fascinating facts and insight, this book will fuel dinner party debate, and provide readers with the science and politics behind the world’s most controversial resource. Without oil, there would be no globalisation, no plastic, little transport, and a global political landscape that few would recognise. It is the lifeblood of the modern world, and humanity’s dependence upon it looks set to continue for decades to come. In this captivating book, the author of the acclaimed A Beginner’s Guide, Vaclav Smil, explains all matters related to the ‘black stuff’, from its discovery in the earth, right through to the political maelstrom that surrounds it today. Author Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has written over 10 books on energy and been a keynote speaker at both the World Economic Forum and the Global Roundtable on Climate Change. He is the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology and is a Special Fellow of the Royal Society.
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2008
About the author
Vaclav Smil
67 books3,886 followersVaclav Smil Ph.D. (Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University, 1971; RNDr., Charles University, Prague, 1965), is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2010 was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
October 20, 2022
A very solid introduction to oil, or "oils," as Smil reasonably prefers. Very typical of his oeuvre - lots of technical details and dates, and less by way of general introduction. In his short section on fracking, for example, he gives a timeline of production dates and volume, but doesn't really spend much time explaining what fracking is. He does better on oil sands production, and given the absolutely key importance he places on fracking, I wish he'd gone into it in more depth.
Generally I'd prefer a bit more conceptual introduction to topics and a bit less by way of facts and figures. He also tends to jump into sometimes-extremely-dense technical topics without giving much explanation for the general reader, as when he says "Rotors are places eccentrically and their motion about the stator axis acts as a gear reduction that lowers the speed and increases the torque as the number of lobes increases," in his section on oil drilling, or when he says "the secular fluctuations of CO2 (driven by orbital, geotectonic and climatic factors) often result in an obvious cyclicity of depositions" in his chapter on oil formation. I'm not sure how seriously he takes the "beginner's guide" concept.
As I so often find with Smil, there's a kind of peevishness in how he handles arguments he disagrees with that seems kind of petty to me, and it reduces my reading enjoyment somewhat. In this case, it's mostly directed at peak oil people who receive a totally disproportionate amount of attention and scorn in the fifth chapter.
But you take the bad with the good, and Smil is one of those authors where I say thank God he exists, because I don't know what I'd do without him. This book is sometimes a bit thick, but it's also dense with useful and important facts and is generally governed by a sanguine, rational perspective.
Generally I'd prefer a bit more conceptual introduction to topics and a bit less by way of facts and figures. He also tends to jump into sometimes-extremely-dense technical topics without giving much explanation for the general reader, as when he says "Rotors are places eccentrically and their motion about the stator axis acts as a gear reduction that lowers the speed and increases the torque as the number of lobes increases," in his section on oil drilling, or when he says "the secular fluctuations of CO2 (driven by orbital, geotectonic and climatic factors) often result in an obvious cyclicity of depositions" in his chapter on oil formation. I'm not sure how seriously he takes the "beginner's guide" concept.
As I so often find with Smil, there's a kind of peevishness in how he handles arguments he disagrees with that seems kind of petty to me, and it reduces my reading enjoyment somewhat. In this case, it's mostly directed at peak oil people who receive a totally disproportionate amount of attention and scorn in the fifth chapter.
But you take the bad with the good, and Smil is one of those authors where I say thank God he exists, because I don't know what I'd do without him. This book is sometimes a bit thick, but it's also dense with useful and important facts and is generally governed by a sanguine, rational perspective.
April 4, 2020
Oil: A Beginner's Guide. Title says it all, really.
One idea I encountered here was the link between energy and civilization, which you'd think would have been obvious to me. I guess I never really thought about how much we need energy to do nearly everything. To some extent, we can think of this link as easily as this: where do we get free time? Smil points out that "all traditional agricultures were highly labor-intensive, commonly employing in excess of 80% of all labor." But now we can commute (I say this without irony) to distant jobs in a matter of minutes, unless traffic's bad. It doesn't seem a leap to me that complexity is aided by the energy we can access and that oil has allowed us to access a lot of energy.
(In this sense, oil freed people to do interesting work. Now, however, we worry a lot about automation, which should free us still more. I myself worry with an acute sense of existential dread when I think about robots going around doing pretty much everything. Will reading and writing books be enough for us?)
Given the link between energy and the civilization we have created, I was surprised by how unfamiliar I was with oil production. What is the largest oil field? Are pipelines better for transporting oil than trucks? (It seems the answer is yes.) What are the most important companies in this battle to lucratively supply the world with energy? I was surprised by how often I had to admit that I had no idea.
There's a way of talking about energy and the environment that seems almost like a different language from the way Smil talks about it. By this I mean that I mostly read about oil and fossil fuels from well intentioned people who seem idealistic about combatting climate change. (I'd say I'm one of those people.) It's not at all obvious to me that people within the industry view these questions in even remotely the same way.
It may be possible that many of the greatest engineering and logistical feats of the past century were achieved by the oil industry.
Smil invites readers to think about both the costs and benefits of oil. Much of what our world does that we find amazing today comes from our use of oil, for example. Many of the costs of oil do not seem very well captured by economists, and Smil more than once admits that we don't know things because oil companies keep a lot of their data private. Oddly, there is a scene in Atwood's Oryx and Crake, "Blood and Roses," that asks a similar question of human achievements: do they outweigh environmental costs?
This is the sort of book that provides a lot of information. Frankly, it was so far outside my wheelhouse that my primary takeaway may be that I should just read more about energy, and quite possibly in other Vaclav Smil books.
One idea I encountered here was the link between energy and civilization, which you'd think would have been obvious to me. I guess I never really thought about how much we need energy to do nearly everything. To some extent, we can think of this link as easily as this: where do we get free time? Smil points out that "all traditional agricultures were highly labor-intensive, commonly employing in excess of 80% of all labor." But now we can commute (I say this without irony) to distant jobs in a matter of minutes, unless traffic's bad. It doesn't seem a leap to me that complexity is aided by the energy we can access and that oil has allowed us to access a lot of energy.
(In this sense, oil freed people to do interesting work. Now, however, we worry a lot about automation, which should free us still more. I myself worry with an acute sense of existential dread when I think about robots going around doing pretty much everything. Will reading and writing books be enough for us?)
Given the link between energy and the civilization we have created, I was surprised by how unfamiliar I was with oil production. What is the largest oil field? Are pipelines better for transporting oil than trucks? (It seems the answer is yes.) What are the most important companies in this battle to lucratively supply the world with energy? I was surprised by how often I had to admit that I had no idea.
There's a way of talking about energy and the environment that seems almost like a different language from the way Smil talks about it. By this I mean that I mostly read about oil and fossil fuels from well intentioned people who seem idealistic about combatting climate change. (I'd say I'm one of those people.) It's not at all obvious to me that people within the industry view these questions in even remotely the same way.
It may be possible that many of the greatest engineering and logistical feats of the past century were achieved by the oil industry.
Smil invites readers to think about both the costs and benefits of oil. Much of what our world does that we find amazing today comes from our use of oil, for example. Many of the costs of oil do not seem very well captured by economists, and Smil more than once admits that we don't know things because oil companies keep a lot of their data private. Oddly, there is a scene in Atwood's Oryx and Crake, "Blood and Roses," that asks a similar question of human achievements: do they outweigh environmental costs?
This is the sort of book that provides a lot of information. Frankly, it was so far outside my wheelhouse that my primary takeaway may be that I should just read more about energy, and quite possibly in other Vaclav Smil books.
December 21, 2015
Very fact dense, almost more like reference material at times with not a lot of organized narrative. Listening on audio was difficult at times, for example as the author catalogs every major oil field on the planet. But overall I came away with a much more thorough appreciation for the general ubiquity of oil, it's pricing, as well as an understanding why peak oil scares are unfounded. Would have liked a larger exploration of the political environment around oil, which Smil does get into but only briefly. He never touches on the concept of the petrodollar for example.
Anyway, totally bitumen, dude.
Anyway, totally bitumen, dude.
February 23, 2014
Unreadable! What a mess. By profession I am an organic chemist (ret), and still I find this book incomprehensible. I leafed through it and was encouraged when I saw structural formulas. Not the way I would have drawn them, but that's OK. Then I read the permanent chapter. What a mess! The section on economics and geology are equally befuddling.
I ordered this book after reading a glowing review of Smil's work and an engaging personal interview in in WIRED. Guy sounds like a genius. How could he have authored such an ill-conceived,poorly executed abomination as this.
I haven't given up on Smil. I have asked local library to locate some more of his stuff. We'll see.
I ordered this book after reading a glowing review of Smil's work and an engaging personal interview in in WIRED. Guy sounds like a genius. How could he have authored such an ill-conceived,poorly executed abomination as this.
I haven't given up on Smil. I have asked local library to locate some more of his stuff. We'll see.
February 17, 2020
I've always had alot of questions about oil exploration and extraction, and this book has answered them all. It has also introduced a lot of astonishing facts!
It covers all what's related to Oil; the geology of its extraction, extraction techniques, history of discoveries and price fluctuations, the valuable byproducts of crude oil, the real (economic, environmental, societal) costs and benefits of oil...
It covers all what's related to Oil; the geology of its extraction, extraction techniques, history of discoveries and price fluctuations, the valuable byproducts of crude oil, the real (economic, environmental, societal) costs and benefits of oil...
June 10, 2019
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.
*************************
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
BTW, the part on building big rigs is very boring (for me) so I totally skip this whole chapter.
*************************
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
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 4, 2024
Having read Energy: A Beginner's Guide recently, I approached 'Oil' with less trepidation. I expected to find a wealth of details and data points and wasn't disappointed. Describing the book to a relative who trades energy derivatives, I mentioned the length of the book may put people off. He reminded me of the wise words (of Blaise Pascal): 'If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.' That might be fair criticism for some authors, but Vaclav Smil can get away with it. His books contain interesting details and historical anecdotes, and I don't tire quickly from reading his work.
Oil: A Beginner's Guide is a good and detailed look at one of the most important, if currently unloved, sources of human development. The book wasn't as long as I thought; I read it on my Kindle under 'old man' font. Many will find things in it helpful - including metrics and ways to think about Oil relative to other energy sources.
The book does boil the subject down to its core ingredients. Still, it then refines and distils facts about the various hydrocarbons that form 'Oils' in an informative manner. I came away with a more profound sense of the intrinsic value of oil.
I gave it a solid 'four stars'.
Oil: A Beginner's Guide is a good and detailed look at one of the most important, if currently unloved, sources of human development. The book wasn't as long as I thought; I read it on my Kindle under 'old man' font. Many will find things in it helpful - including metrics and ways to think about Oil relative to other energy sources.
The book does boil the subject down to its core ingredients. Still, it then refines and distils facts about the various hydrocarbons that form 'Oils' in an informative manner. I came away with a more profound sense of the intrinsic value of oil.
I gave it a solid 'four stars'.
June 8, 2014
Non-peak, non-climate, and yet missing oil's essence
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
Energy writing is a genre in its own right, but still in search of its defining rules. Here you have a bit of chemistry, a hint of geology, a summary of oil politics, a flavour of history of technology, a sprinkle of economc history, and a polemic conclusion.
Let's start from the conclusion: peak oil is nowhere to be seen, energy transitions are unpredictable and never driven by scarcity, and future generations will fend for themselves as we've fended for ourselves - which is the quintessential (optimistic or remorseless, depending on the point of view) capitalistic attitude.
If that's the case, how come oil is such an interesting topic from a political perspective? Why does capitalism, which worries about nothing, worry so much about oil? Or, where does oil's power stem from? From its Jurassic origins, from its unparalleled energy density, from its uneven distribution underneath the earth's crust, from the technology developed to turn it into work, or from the way it is produced, refined and distributed?
The book is above all a celebration of the ingenuity of the inventors and business men who managed to make this source of energy available and exploitable for economic purposes. An absolute faith in science and technology sustains the book all the way through to its last sentence. But as the ode to science and technology unfolds, the eerie signs of oil's "supernatural" and more poignantly "supertechnological" nature are planted in the reader's mind. The minoritarian theory of oil's abyssal abiogenic origins rings unexpectedly true. The focus on the prehistoric times that gave birth to our current reserves engenders an unscientific sense of awe. Is it possible, one wonders, that mankind was given oil by an extraterrestrial civilization keen for us to evolve and reach out to them, in the spirit of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Truth is that oil is a force we struggle with. There's too much of it, always in the "wrong" place, and in the "wrong" hands. It is a commons, with an undetermined social cost, calling for regulation, thus undercutting our enthusiasm for free, and totally erratic, markets. The Seven Sisters, the Texas Railroad Commission and OPEC made clumsy attempts at harnessing oil's destabilizing abundance. We can do better. No technology can do that on our behalf.
By the way, if you're looking for an explanation of how those Texan rigs that look like hammers work, you won't find it here.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
Energy writing is a genre in its own right, but still in search of its defining rules. Here you have a bit of chemistry, a hint of geology, a summary of oil politics, a flavour of history of technology, a sprinkle of economc history, and a polemic conclusion.
Let's start from the conclusion: peak oil is nowhere to be seen, energy transitions are unpredictable and never driven by scarcity, and future generations will fend for themselves as we've fended for ourselves - which is the quintessential (optimistic or remorseless, depending on the point of view) capitalistic attitude.
If that's the case, how come oil is such an interesting topic from a political perspective? Why does capitalism, which worries about nothing, worry so much about oil? Or, where does oil's power stem from? From its Jurassic origins, from its unparalleled energy density, from its uneven distribution underneath the earth's crust, from the technology developed to turn it into work, or from the way it is produced, refined and distributed?
The book is above all a celebration of the ingenuity of the inventors and business men who managed to make this source of energy available and exploitable for economic purposes. An absolute faith in science and technology sustains the book all the way through to its last sentence. But as the ode to science and technology unfolds, the eerie signs of oil's "supernatural" and more poignantly "supertechnological" nature are planted in the reader's mind. The minoritarian theory of oil's abyssal abiogenic origins rings unexpectedly true. The focus on the prehistoric times that gave birth to our current reserves engenders an unscientific sense of awe. Is it possible, one wonders, that mankind was given oil by an extraterrestrial civilization keen for us to evolve and reach out to them, in the spirit of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Truth is that oil is a force we struggle with. There's too much of it, always in the "wrong" place, and in the "wrong" hands. It is a commons, with an undetermined social cost, calling for regulation, thus undercutting our enthusiasm for free, and totally erratic, markets. The Seven Sisters, the Texas Railroad Commission and OPEC made clumsy attempts at harnessing oil's destabilizing abundance. We can do better. No technology can do that on our behalf.
By the way, if you're looking for an explanation of how those Texan rigs that look like hammers work, you won't find it here.
August 22, 2021
Niekde som zachytil, že Bill Gates číta všetko, čo Vaclav Smil publikuje. Kniha je plná čísel a štatistík, čo je miestami až únavné. Na druhej strane ma bavilo prierezové spracovanie témy "ropa" z pohľadu dejín, významu a dopadu na spoločnosť, chémie, spôsobu vyhľadávania, produkcie, transportu, politiky a mnohého iného. Zaujímavá bola analýza o prekliatí krajín bohatých na ropu v podobe plytvania, korupcie a nadmernej spotrebe. Zostal som prekvapený, čo všetko ropa vlastne je a že aj okolo jej pôvodu sú viaceré hypotézy. V knihe nie je výrazne akcentovaný rozmer dopadu ropného priemyslu na klímu ale je popretkávaná strohými analytickými faktami ako "ak spaľujeme rafinované ropné produkty, konvertujeme dedičstvo planéty, ktoré zostalo neporušene ležať viac ako 100 miliónov rokov" alebo "každý liter benzínu predstavuje nejakých 25 ton pôvodne uloženej morskej biomasy".
Mohutné geopolitické úvahy prakticky absentujú a je to len dobre. Viac priestoru dostal popis techniky vyhľadávania ropy a spôsob realizácie vrtov. Výborná je záverečná kapitola o zostávajúcich zásobách ropy. Na príklade prechodu na uhlie a neskôr na ropu autor pekne ukazuje, že rozvinutú industrializovanú spoločnosť s vysokou kvalitou života sme tu mali pred ropou a budeme ju mať aj naďalej po tom, ako sa kvapalnú uhľovodíky stanú menšinou zložkou v zásobovaní energiou. Pekne vyvracia argumenty niektorých obhajcov katastrofických scenárov (označuje ich ako kombináciu rozumných argumentov a neobhájiteľných domnienok). Budúci dopyt nie je imúnny voči externým faktorom a na predpovedanie konečných zásob potrebujeme presnú prognózu vedy a technológií v budúcnosti, čo samozrejme nemáme. V úplnom závere sú aj prekvapivé informácie o možných spôsoboch ťažby v budúcnosti ako aj nekonvenčných zdrojoch uhľovodíkoch.
Mohutné geopolitické úvahy prakticky absentujú a je to len dobre. Viac priestoru dostal popis techniky vyhľadávania ropy a spôsob realizácie vrtov. Výborná je záverečná kapitola o zostávajúcich zásobách ropy. Na príklade prechodu na uhlie a neskôr na ropu autor pekne ukazuje, že rozvinutú industrializovanú spoločnosť s vysokou kvalitou života sme tu mali pred ropou a budeme ju mať aj naďalej po tom, ako sa kvapalnú uhľovodíky stanú menšinou zložkou v zásobovaní energiou. Pekne vyvracia argumenty niektorých obhajcov katastrofických scenárov (označuje ich ako kombináciu rozumných argumentov a neobhájiteľných domnienok). Budúci dopyt nie je imúnny voči externým faktorom a na predpovedanie konečných zásob potrebujeme presnú prognózu vedy a technológií v budúcnosti, čo samozrejme nemáme. V úplnom závere sú aj prekvapivé informácie o možných spôsoboch ťažby v budúcnosti ako aj nekonvenčných zdrojoch uhľovodíkoch.
November 28, 2021
# Svet bez ropy je momentálne nemysliteľný.
# Na obchode s ropou najviac profituje štát.
# Jedna z teórii hovorí, že ropa má abiogenný pôvod.
# Najväčšie ropné pole Ghawar.
# Obchod s ropou je vždy koncentrovaný čo sa týka predaja alebo nákupu.
# Surová ropa nikdy neprekonala uhlie.
# Nevieme stanoviť konečné zásoby ropy, nato aby sme to vedeli, potrebujeme poznať presný vývoj vedy a technológií v budúcnosti. (Adelman)
# Prechod na zelenú energiu je nákladný a zdĺhavý proces, ktorý sa vlečie dekády rokov.
# Švédsko v roku 2006 oznámilo, že do roku 2020 chce byť prvou zemou bez ropy.
# Svet bez ropy je ešte ďaleko.
# Na obchode s ropou najviac profituje štát.
# Jedna z teórii hovorí, že ropa má abiogenný pôvod.
# Najväčšie ropné pole Ghawar.
# Obchod s ropou je vždy koncentrovaný čo sa týka predaja alebo nákupu.
# Surová ropa nikdy neprekonala uhlie.
# Nevieme stanoviť konečné zásoby ropy, nato aby sme to vedeli, potrebujeme poznať presný vývoj vedy a technológií v budúcnosti. (Adelman)
# Prechod na zelenú energiu je nákladný a zdĺhavý proces, ktorý sa vlečie dekády rokov.
# Švédsko v roku 2006 oznámilo, že do roku 2020 chce byť prvou zemou bez ropy.
# Svet bez ropy je ešte ďaleko.
July 8, 2010
Full of details about the history, uses, extraction, and refining of petroleum. Semi-technical, mostly objective.
July 21, 2018
An utterly engrossing primer in the business of oil, right from its formation to its exploration and extraction
April 12, 2020
Interesting book on oil, very dense with info. You might not understand all that has been covered but still worth while reading!
April 11, 2023
The book delivers on the promise of being a beginner's guide to oil. It covers all the bases that one would want to know about the oil business - formation, extraction, refining, marketing, and its future. The breadth naturally led to missing depth, but the author provides a warning for the lack of depth. The book missed discussing oil as an industrial feedstock and focuses on oil's use in transportation and heat/electricity generation. Consequently, it also misses noting the essential nature of these industrial uses.
With that being said, half of the book could have been a table of facts. It's interesting to see a list of all the super-giant oil fields in the world, but, I do want to know something other than how much oil sits in that field. The book was very very fact dense, which made it slightly unreadable. There is not a lot of story being told because the author focused on noting so many facts around Oil. It is a short textbook. I guess that's a guide ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Nonetheless, I enjoyed it as a quick read and look forward to reading other books by the author.
With that being said, half of the book could have been a table of facts. It's interesting to see a list of all the super-giant oil fields in the world, but, I do want to know something other than how much oil sits in that field. The book was very very fact dense, which made it slightly unreadable. There is not a lot of story being told because the author focused on noting so many facts around Oil. It is a short textbook. I guess that's a guide ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Nonetheless, I enjoyed it as a quick read and look forward to reading other books by the author.
November 4, 2021
If you looking for a basic introduction to the petroleum industry, start right here. Smil is known for his beginners guides to various aspects of the energy industries and he provides a rather complete one for the initiate with this one. From basic geology for the formation of petroleum through the discovery and utilization changes over the decades to the different types of extraction available today and the different types of oil from light sweet to the thick, viscous bitumen which is extracted from the oil sands and used mostly in construction and roads.
He finishes with his own ideas on whether the world economy will ever totally remove itself from a demand for oil which he considers not possible - at least not for several more decades if not a century due to the slow acceptance of electric vehicles in some areas and the total lack in many others.
A good overall view of an industry that has a major influence on the world economy.
2021-221
He finishes with his own ideas on whether the world economy will ever totally remove itself from a demand for oil which he considers not possible - at least not for several more decades if not a century due to the slow acceptance of electric vehicles in some areas and the total lack in many others.
A good overall view of an industry that has a major influence on the world economy.
2021-221
August 1, 2018
This little book has a tremendous amount of detail about finding, transporting and refining oil. Smil says the transition to a post-carbon future will be a protracted process that, while difficult and disruptive, can be achieved without economic turmoil. This happened with the shift from biomass to coal and from coal to oil. We are now going through a transition from reliance on oil to increased use of natural gas, a bridge fuel to non-carbon renewables. Smil says the peak-oilers are completely off base. We have plenty of conventional and non-conventional reserves of oil (and gas) that are available for use, if we choose, well beyond the mid-point of the 21st century. the effect of extracting and burning these hydrocarbons on global climate is the potential sword of Damocles in all of this.
June 28, 2020
This book is a thorough explanation of the oil industry, yet there's almost no discussion of climate change — a huge omission. In fact 20% of the book is devoted to pushing back against the idea of Peak Oil but even if the author is correct in how much remains available, there's no discussion about whether the planet can sustain burning it. I find it pretty telling that in a book so dry, some rare emotion is deployed to describe future oil discoveries: "in the future there may be some *pleasant surprises* as we discover more giants than is currently anticipated." (emphasis mine)
But like other books by Vaclav Smil, despite the frustrations while reading them, you just end up learning so much.
But like other books by Vaclav Smil, despite the frustrations while reading them, you just end up learning so much.
October 27, 2020
This book contains all the necessary technical information, which Yergin's The Prize lacks. And also, aside from the technological side of oil production, Smil's understanding of the market as a whole is really impressive.
PS: The important note on oil prices: "The impossibility of predicting sudden shifts in oil demand, the risk of violent conflicts and political upheavals, and a distorted understanding of oil resources combine to produce a market ruled by perception, fear, heard behavior and temporary panic - and hence commonly by overreaction. One year the headlines have the world drowning in oil, a few years later they have it facing the end of the oil era"
PS: The important note on oil prices: "The impossibility of predicting sudden shifts in oil demand, the risk of violent conflicts and political upheavals, and a distorted understanding of oil resources combine to produce a market ruled by perception, fear, heard behavior and temporary panic - and hence commonly by overreaction. One year the headlines have the world drowning in oil, a few years later they have it facing the end of the oil era"
June 18, 2021
Fascinating essay on oil. From its composition to its discovery and extraction to its transportation. Can you believe that all the oil, coal and natural gas we extract and use to power our world and create much of the stuff we use was created from the biological decomposition, over millions of years, of critters and plants?
Some tricky technical stuff on the chemical composition which sailed over my head. But mostly accessible and eye opening. Super giant basin anyone?
Audiobook well read, albeit with occasional stumbling, by Robert Meldrum.
Some tricky technical stuff on the chemical composition which sailed over my head. But mostly accessible and eye opening. Super giant basin anyone?
Audiobook well read, albeit with occasional stumbling, by Robert Meldrum.
June 27, 2020
Worth the read if you have questions about any aspect of oil, and don't know where to start. For me, I wanted to know more but didn't even know enough to formulate questions and find my own answers, and that's where this book was perfect. There were sections that had too much info and detail for me, and there were some that caught my interest and I'd like to explore further. The recommended further reading section at the end had a good collection of materials for further pursuit.
July 25, 2021
A good, if somewhat dry, introduction to oil usage, geological production, extraction and refinement, and possible future. While most of these have not changed appreciably in the 13 years since publication, there are a couple of points which are glaring for their absence. For example, the existence of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles pops up only as a speculative possibility (full battery-electric vehicles were beyond the realms of the 2008 imagination).
September 5, 2019
Too broad and short deeply, I'm sure many people will come to this book expecting some topics to be treated and found there are not present in the book or are barely discussed. If you want to know about the chemistry of oil, pick another book, if you want to know about political conflicts due to oil, read another book, if you want to know about the economy behind oil well, read another book.
December 18, 2019
Smil provides a useful overview of the oil and gas industry. However, the volume of statistics may be too much for non technical readers. Nevertheless, he addresses what is probably the most pressing question: what is the future of the industry? Smil predicts that the industry will be around for at least the rest of the 21st century.
September 29, 2022
A detailed explanation of how oil is used, drawn from the oceanic crust and, oil's basic composition. Oil is a tool that allows society to function well within cities using modern machinery. Politics and government plays a major role on how oil
is perceived. One thing is certain the evidence that supports scarcity of oil to this day remains unfounded.
is perceived. One thing is certain the evidence that supports scarcity of oil to this day remains unfounded.
May 2, 2020
Informative read about oil
I was looking to learn the basics about oil and this book helped me accomplish this goal. I like how Smil made this is a 200 page book rather than a 800 page book - he stayed as high level as possible.
I was looking to learn the basics about oil and this book helped me accomplish this goal. I like how Smil made this is a 200 page book rather than a 800 page book - he stayed as high level as possible.
October 27, 2022
O livro é bom.
O problema é a falta de fluidez do texto. Oscila entre dados pouco relevantes com informações muito interessantes.
Mesmo com essa irregularidade ainda vale a pena ler. Principalmente para quem quer mesmo estar bem informado sobre petróleo e gás.
O problema é a falta de fluidez do texto. Oscila entre dados pouco relevantes com informações muito interessantes.
Mesmo com essa irregularidade ainda vale a pena ler. Principalmente para quem quer mesmo estar bem informado sobre petróleo e gás.
December 11, 2022
Great overview of Oil for the non expert
Vaclav lays out a detailed, yet easy to follow, history of fossil fuels. He delves into the myths and truths of oil production, cost, consumption and future replacement.
Vaclav lays out a detailed, yet easy to follow, history of fossil fuels. He delves into the myths and truths of oil production, cost, consumption and future replacement.
May 8, 2023
Tons of info, in a very densely packed package. Smil seems to deal strictly with the facts of oil, a lot of facts. For a beginner's guide, it probably should have been more approachable. Still worthwhile.
September 25, 2023
Great read
The book is a fantastic overview of oil - it’s origins, the oil markets, transportation mechanism, and how long will it last. It goes into quite a bit of depth and can sometimes loose the reader, but on the whole, highly recommended for anyone looking to understand oil.
The book is a fantastic overview of oil - it’s origins, the oil markets, transportation mechanism, and how long will it last. It goes into quite a bit of depth and can sometimes loose the reader, but on the whole, highly recommended for anyone looking to understand oil.
October 20, 2019
Top Class read to understand various historical and geopolitical perspective of the single most important source of energy present on the planet.
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