A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [115]
During the Renaissance, oil and asphalt from shallow pools discovered in the Far East found their way to Europe, and traders soon established routes to the West. By the 1600s, petroleum was lighting streets in Italy and Prague. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, asphalt was being used extensively to build roads.
In the New World, natives in what is now Venezuela used petroleum to caulk boats and baskets and for lighting and medicines. In 1539, a barrel of Venezuelan oil was sent by ship to Spain to soothe the gout of Emperor Charles V. In North America, certain natives used oil in rituals and for making paints.
The modern commercial petroleum era began in 1820, when a lead pipe was used to bring gas from a natural seep near Fredonia, New York, to nearby consumers and a local hotel. In 1852, Polish farmers in Pennsylvania asked a local pharmacist to distill oil from a local seep. They were hoping to make vodka, but the result was undrinkable. It burned, though, and so they invented kerosene. The invention of the kerosene lamp two years later created a mass market for commercial kerosene, and soon towns everywhere were glowing with the light of petroleum. In 1858, Colonel Edwin Drake pounded a well sixty-nine feet into the ground near Titusville, Pennsylvania. It produced a continuous flow of oil, and within a short time kerosene replaced whale oil for lighting lamps. In the 1880s, the first oil tanker began carrying oil across the ocean. By the 1970s, the seas began bearing thousand-foot-long supertankers capable of containing 800,000 tons of oil. Today oil accounts for over half the tonnage of all sea cargoes.
Petroleum didn’t really get big until the internal combustion engines of the twentieth century and the autos, tractors, trucks, and, eventually, aircraft they powered. Middle East oil ramped up rapidly in the late 1940s. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, in Iraq in 1927, and in Saudi Arabia in 1938. By the 1970s, the oil fields of the Middle East were producing about half the world’s oil. Between 1950 and 1970, annual world oil production surged from 500 million to 3 billion tons. Today there are more miles of petroleum pipelines than of railroads.
Saudi Arabia is now by far the world’s largest oil producer. (The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.) The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has the greatest oil reserves. Its member countries include some notable enemies of the United States, and some friends the likes of which make enemies unnecessary.
In many parts of the world, depletion of land-based oil has forced drillers to the continental margins and beyond. In 1947, the first in-water oil well began operating from a wooden platform in sixteen feet of water off Louisiana.
Today one of the most innovative and promising ideas for a new liquid fuel to replace petroleum involves extracting energy from the oil in genetically engineered algae. Algae make oil that can be converted to biodiesel; they can be used to make ethanol; they can be converted to biogas; and they take carbon dioxide out of the air. It may seem surprising that algae create long-chain hydrocarbons resembling petroleum crude oil, but it shouldn’t. Energy from the oil in algae, it turns out, is pretty much what we’ve been using. Algae is, though, vastly better than petroleum in terms of risks and consequences. Unlike such other fuel sources as corn, soybeans, and sugarcane, algae do not compete with our food supply or, like palm oil, cause farmers to cut down tropical forests. And because algae absorb carbon dioxide—the main pollutant from burning fossil fuels—their