OIL: ITS ORIGIN, DISCOVERY, AND HISTORY
The Great Producing States before 1914 and in 1921
Oil is found naturally in different forms. Sometimes it occurs as a volatile liquid at ordinary temperatures; it is then known as naphtha. Sometimes the volatile principles are only given off at higher temperatures; it is then called petroleum or rock-oil. Sometimes also it appears in a semi-solid form, asphalt, its volatile properties having already evaporated.
It is very rarely that oil is found on the surface or gushing up by itself without the help of pumps. It is usually met with at a great depth underground, in pockets in which oil and gas are found above water. Thus, in order to detect its presence, it is necessary to make borings. When one reaches a pocket in the neighbourhood of the gas, the latter escapes by the outlet which is offered. If the boring first reaches oil, and if the pressure of gas is sufficient, the oil gushes out and forms a spring. This is what happened in the Caucasus, where certain wells spouted up to a height of eighty metres through the borings made by the prospectors. More often the gas pressure is not sufficient to raise the liquid to the surface, and it is necessary to install pumps driven by steam to empty the pocket. At the time of the boring, when the cylindrical metal drill, driven vertically by a metal cable and held vertical by the derrick (a sort of pyramidal framework of metal), reaches the deposit, the gas which has been accumulating for thousands of years escapes, driving, pushing, sucking up the oil, and making a fountain, a gusher, a sort of artesian well. The oil is led away in metal pipes, vertical till they reach the surface, horizontal to the refineries, ports, or other destinations. Once the well is capped, it is not touched again; it is alone in the desert, and only a metre records its daily output, while hundreds of thousands of men are obliged to work underground to wrest coal from the bowels of the earth by the strength of their arms!
The depth of the wells varies from 200 to 1,600 metres, according to the region. The duration of the flow is essentially variable, depending upon the magnitude of the deposit of oil. But it goes without saying that when a spring has flowed for seven years more or less, like the first one exploited by the Mexican Eagle, it gives out, yielding salt water. The fact is quite ordinary, and is known in all competent circles, although it is sometimes brandished as a warning by interested people in order to lower the value of certain oil shares. One often hears of "pools," "rivers," or "veritable lakes of oil." These expressions are most inaccurate. Apart from certain exceptions, such as the famous well of the Colombia in Rumania in 1913, the deposits of oil are neither rivers nor pools. They are actually solid layers of sandstone, often very hard, impregnated, saturated with oil. This sandstone is very porous and contains thousands of cavities or pockets enclosing the precious "rock-oil." Its thickness varies from the usual 30 or 50 metres (giving wells of a yield of 200, 500, or 1,000 barrels a day) to one kilometre in certain wells of the Eagle (yielding 70,000 to 100,000 barrels a day, instead of 200 to 1,000). The Eagle is lucky, it must be admitted, and its history is unique in the annals of oil. Only its sister company, the Mexican Oil, which works in the same field, but for the Standard Oil group, can be compared with it.
Even a superficial examination of the chemical composition of oil, a hydrocarbon, in which the carbon, in a proportion of 80 to 88 per cent., is combined with hydrogen, and sometimes with a little oxygen, reveals in this compound a marvellous source of thermal energy, which may manifest itself in various ways. For, from the greenish-brown oil which is lighter than water, no less than 128 chemical compounds are obtained, which are used in forty different industries. From the retort in which the crude oil is distilled comes an infinity of substances of basic importance in modern industry.
Although the intensive use of oil and its industrial applications are of comparatively recent date, the discovery of deposits of petroleum goes back to remote antiquity.
The history of oil is as old as the world, since there is already mention of it in the Book of Genesis. The wells of Baku were known long before the Christian era. In the peninsula of Apsheron, where they are situated, arose the cult of Zoroaster and the fire-worshippers. According to the latter, the flames which escaped from the soil would burn until the end of the world. They were, at any rate, famed throughout the world nearly three thousand years ago.
The Greeks and Romans were acquainted with oil. The latter called it bitumen. In Low Latin it was petroleus, from petra—stone, and oleum—oil; and the word has come down to us through the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who adopted it.