What Is Oil?

It seems like a simple and direct question. Look in a dictionary and you will find a very specific definition. That definition really doesn't answer the question at all. Ask a chemist, and you will get a very technical answer. Again, the answer would leave most of us wondering. An automobile mechanic would probably give you a very simple and direct answer, telling you it is something you put in the engine of your car. Ask a politician, and there is no telling the kind of answer you might get. Depending on who you ask, the answer will almost always be different. Oil is something, or many things, to all of us. However, I believe oil is much more than any of us fully understand. Oil is the food which allows the world live. Unfortunately, it is also something the world is dangerously dependent on for survival.

As a child, oil was the black gooey stuff that came out of the ground, as well as the dirty fluid my father drained from his car. I can vividly remember the opening to the television show, The Beverly Hillbillies. Jed, the father of the hillbilly family, was out one day hunting for food with his rifle. Missing his target, the bullet entered the ground. Then, the song goes something like this, "And up through the ground came a bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea!" The visual in my head was of my mother's china tea cups filled with the dirty fluid drained from my father's car. Somehow, this stuff made Jed a millionaire. Oil can make, even the biggest Texas hillbilly, a Beverly Hills millionaire. Why would my father throw it away?

As I grew a little older, into my early teen years, I moved past my Beverly Hillbilly understanding of oil. I viewed oil as the stuff my father purchased for his car, in quart size bottles, from the auto parts store. Alternatively, I suspect my sister's understanding of oil related to the bottle of gold colored liquid my mother purchased at the grocery store. However, when I started driving, I realized oil is much more than just the stuff you put in your car's engine. Being a teenage driver in my father's home meant driving an old worn out car. Not wanting to walk my dates to the movie theater, I learned how to repair and maintain my old beater of a car. I learned exactly what oil means to a car, and my lifestyle. Oil in the right amounts, as well as in the right places, was what gave life to my car, and my social life.

Drawing on childish understanding, I know oil is the black gooey stuff that comes out of the ground. Remembering my earth science class at community college, I also know oil is formed from tiny plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Grouped together, under ideal conditions of complete chance, these plants and animals were covered by layers of sediment. Millions of years of pressure and heat chemically changed the plants and animals into what we now call crude oil. For the most part, crude oil is of no use in the form it comes out of the ground. It must be changed, or refined, into products we can use. Refining is a process of heating the crude oil to separate it into different oil products. From the refined crude oil, many products are produced, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, motor oil, petrochemicals, and many other products that are a part of our everyday life. All of these products are oil.

Again, looking to childhood wisdom, we know oil can make a lucky person a millionaire. However, remembering what I can from the several history classes I have taken over the years, I know oil was not discovered in Texas, by Jed Clampett. Oil has been used by humanity for a long time. Among the historians, I do not believe there is complete agreement as to where and when oil was first discovered. The history books do tell us, several thousand years B.C., that oil was scooped from pools where the oil naturally seeped from the ground. In oil's early days, it was used as fuel for lamps, heat, and for numerous other practical purposes. Over thousands of years, oil's use evolved. However, it was not until the automobile was mass produced in the early twentieth century, oil would become such a sought after commodity. From the day the first car was built, the demand for oil grew. We needed gasoline for our cars. Therefore, oil is the fuel of transportation.

Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, oil became a multi-billion dollar business. It didn't matter if you were most educated person in the world or a high school drop out. Millionaires were made of anyone owning land where an oil well could pull oil from the ground. Most of the wealth in our country is directly or indirectly attributable to the oil industry. Accordingly, oil is wealth.

But oil did not only make millionaires, it was the catalyst in the development of a strong middle class. It was oil that fueled the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution produced jobs for the masses. The automobile industry owes its existence to oil. The aircraft industry owes is existence to oil. In fact, it is not hard to draw direct oil lines from the oil industry to almost all modern industry. The progress humanity made for thousands of years moved at a snails pace, compared to the oil driven twentieth century. Oil is the accelerant of modern civilization.

Industry continues to find new and creative uses for oil. Oil revolutionized the farming industry. Before oil derived petrochemicals were used to produce pesticides and herbicides, farmers were completely at the mercy of insects and weeds. Farmers had to painstakingly pull weeds by hand, or risk losing their crops. They also had to concede a portion of their crop yield to hungry insects. Losing an entire crop to a disease, carried by insects, was not uncommon before modern pesticides were available. Today, thanks to oil, pesticides kill the insects before they can take one bite of the farmer's valuable crops. Imagine a trip to the local grocery store produce department to find no tomatoes, oranges, carrots, or many other basic fruits and vegetables we take for granted. Without oil, the produce section would be limited to what could be farmed in a given time of year, or to the proximity to what is farmed in your geographic area. In a practical sense, oil is farming.

Another industry, plastic manufacturing, is not only helped by oil, it is oil. Plastics are derived from the chemicals produced during the refining process. Plastic touches our lives in almost everything we do. Take a look around your home. Do you have vinyl siding, or nice energy efficient vinyl windows? Yep, they are made from oil. Take a look at your couch or recliner chair? More than likely, it is made partially or completely of oil derived products. Look down at