Black Gold

STRANGE BUT TRUE

How the World Floats on Oil

Have you ever thought about what would happen if the United States were to run out of oil tomorrow It's really interesting to consider because so many things in the United States depend on oil in one way or another. Just about everyone in the United States has a car. But without gasoline, which comes from oil, none of those cars could run. The same goes for all the school buses and taxis. Every big airplane has jet engines. Jet engines burn jet fuel, which comes from oil. So no airplanes could fly.

 And think about all the stores in your town. Everything they sell arrives at their store by truck. The trucks burn diesel fuel. And what do you suppose the diesel fuel comes from You guessed it, oil. So there would be no way to get food or anything else to your neighborhood without oil.

Trains all burn diesel fuel too. Plastic comes from oil. No oil means no plastic. The list goes on and on like this. The United States absolutely depends on oil. Without it, almost everything would grind to a halt. When you hear everyone on the news talking about oil, and your parents talking about the price of gas all the time, this is why. Oil is almost as important as oxygen.

Have you ever wondered what oil is Where does it come from Why do we need so much Can we replace it with something else.

These are all great questions. Let's look for some answers!

What is oil. And what are all the things - like gasoline, kerosene and diesel - that come from oil. Oil is a gooey, slippery black fluid that comes out of the ground. Sometimes it's close to the surface and actually bubbles out of the ground. Other times it lies in giant lakes buried miles underground. Normally what you do to get it out of the ground is drill a hole maybe a foot in diameter down to the lake of oil. Then you line the hole with a big pipe. And then you start pumping the oil out of the ground. One of these underground lakes might hold millions or billions of gallons of oil.

How did the lake of oil get there Imagine an ocean 300 million years ago. This ocean is filled with tiny plants and animals like plankton and diatoms. Over millions of years the plants and animals reproduce, die and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Later, all these dead plankton bodies are covered in sand and clay. These bodies, like all living things, contain lots of carbon and hydrogen atoms. It takes millions of years and incredible heat and pressure, but these thick layers of dead bodies eventually transform into lakes of underground oil. Many of these lakes of oil are found underneath our current oceans. Others are found on land, where oceans used to be millions of years ago.

When we pump oil out of the ground, what we are pumping is all these dead plants and animals. But the heat and pressure has turned the carbon and hydrogen in their bodies into different sized chains of hydrogen and oxygen. So now we can see what oil is. It's a liquid made up of hydrocarbon chains. The chains all have different lengths. Some chains contain only a few carbon atoms. Others are dozens of carbon atoms long.

The oil you pump out of the ground is called crude oil or petroleum. It has all of these different chains mixed together. It is almost useless like this. But, if you can separate the chains and sort them by length, they can be really useful. For example, if you take crude oil and you separate out all the chains that are seven or eight carbon atoms long, what you get is a fluid that we call gasoline. The process of separating the chains like this is called refining.

Refining Oil

If you take crude oil and you heat it, you can easily separate and sort the different sized chains. The reason you can do this is because each different length of carbon chain has a different boiling point. For example, a chain with just one carbon atom in it (CH4) is the lightest chain, known as methane. Methane is a gas so light that it floats like helium. As the chains get longer, they get heavier.

So you boil the crude oil, and then you have a column that cools the vapor back down at different temperatures. You tap off the different products at different temperatures, and voila, you have separated all the chains.

The short chains are gases used in butane lighters and propane grills. The chains with five, six or seven carbons are called Naphtha. These are thin, clear liquids. Dry cleaners use Naphtha to clean clothes. Gasoline uses chains between seven and 11 carbons long. Kerosene (jet fuel) is 12 to 15 carbons long. Diesel fuel is next, then heating oil. When the chains get longer than about 20 carbons, they become solids at room temperature. It goes from paraffin wax to tar to asphalt in this range, depending on the length.

All of these different substances come from crude oil. The only difference is the length of the carbon chains! The refinery simply sorts out the different chain lengths.

Why Is Gasoline So Cool.

So we take crude oil and we turn it into gasoline. Why is gasoline so cool, and why is the United States so dependent on gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel. It's because gasoline contains an incredible amount of energy per gallon. When you burn gasoline with plenty of oxygen, all the carbons and hydrogens in gasoline combine with oxygen. You get carbon dioxide (from the carbon atoms in gasoline), water (from the hydrogen atoms) and lots and lots of heat. How much heat. If you took a 1,500-watt space heater or hair dryer and left it on full blast for a full 24-hour day, that's about how much heat is in a gallon of gas.

Or here is another way to think about it. If it were possible for human beings to digest gasoline, a gallon would contain about 31,000 food calories. The energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy in about 110 hamburgers. If you could .eat. gasoline, then gasoline contains enough .food energy. to last you about 20 days.

You may be wondering why we all haven't converted over to electric cars and trucks. It's because gasoline contains so much energy per gallon. When you pump 20 gallons of gas into a car, it's like feeding your car 720 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If you were to plug an electric car into a typical house outlet -- an outlet big enough to power a 1,500-watt space heater -- it would take 20 days to get the same amount of energy out of that outlet as there is in 20 gallons of gas. It only takes about five minutes to pump the gas. Twenty days versus five minutes is a huge difference. That is why gasoline is so cool.

Getting Gasoline

If you've ever gone to gas up the car with your folks, it seems like getting gas is pretty simple. In that sense it is. But in a bigger scope, it isn't. We use a lot of oil every year. Our cars burn about 65 billion gallons of gas in a year. If you add up all the gas, diesel, jet fuel and everything else, it translates into about 22 million barrels of oil each day. A barrel holds 42 gallons of oil. Here's the problem: The United States only pumps about 9 million barrels a day out of its own wells. The other 13 million barrels come from somewhere else. It might come from places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, the North Sea, Venezuela or Russia. It usually arrives in the United States in giant supertanker ships. Each supertanker might carry 2 million barrels of oil.

Price Of Oil Is Rising So Fast.

Importing all this oil creates a couple of different problems for us. For example, right now China is starting to use lots more oil. There are more than a billion people in China, and most don't have cars. The economy is getting better, so lots more people in China would like to own cars, just like people in the United States. The problem is, there is only so much oil that the world pumps out of the ground every day. The United States wants it. China wants it. Europe wants it. And so on. So the price of oil goes up. This is one reason why the price of oil is rising so fast.

Another problem can be seen in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States pumps lots of oil out of the gulf, and most of its refineries are in the gulf region. When a hurricane comes through, it can damage the oil rigs and refineries, which really cuts down on the amount of oil the United States can produce for itself. That can make gas prices go up too.

And then there are political problems. Because oil is so important to the United States and the world, oil can be used as a weapon, or a bargaining chip. For example, terrorists know how important oil is to the world, and know they could cause lots of problems by cutting off the flow of oil. If terrorists were to blow up a major pumping facility in Saudi Arabia, it would create a very big problem for the world. If Iran were to decide to make a political statement and stop pumping oil for some reason, it would affect oil prices all over the world.

There is one other problem: global warming. Burning gasoline releases lots of carbon into the environment, and that seems to be making the Earth warmer. The warmth is going to cause all sorts of problems. That leaves us all pondering one obvious question, .Is there any way that we could replace gasoline with something else..

Replacing Gasoline

If we could come up with some alternative for gasoline (and the other products of oil), then a lot of these problems would go away. So let's look at some possibilities.

Make cars a lot more efficient. You see a lot of publicity around hybrid vehicles right now. By combining an electric motor with a gasoline engine, cars get better mileage. The only problem is that the batteries and motor make a hybrid car more expensive than a regular car, and right now gas doesn't cost enough to justify it.

Turn plants into ethanol. Ethanol is a lot like gasoline - it is a liquid that contains lots of hydrocarbons. We can create ethanol from corn, or just about any kind of grass. Many cars in the United States are already set up to burn ethanol. Ethanol will certainly play a role, but it probably is not the whole solution.

Use electric cars more often. We can produce electricity with coal, wind power, sun power or nuclear energy, and then use the electricity to charge our cars. That cuts way down on the need for oil. Pure electric cars are still a problem though, because batteries are really heavy and it takes a long time to charge them. A partial solution would be to create .pluggable hybrids.. A pluggable hybrid is a car you would plug in at night. It would be able to go maybe 20 miles or so - the average distance a car drives in a day -- from a charge, acting like a pure electric car. Then it would turn into a gasoline car. Pluggable hybrids might cut the amount of gas we burn in half.

Use hydrogen. You use electricity to make hydrogen. Then use the hydrogen in a fuel cell to create electricity. There's a big problem with hydrogen though - it's hard to store compared to gasoline. If we can solve the storage problem, hydrogen might have a chance.

Use coal and something called shale oil. The United States has lots of coal and shale -- enough to supply us with oil for hundreds of years. We can convert coal and shale to gasoline. It's expensive to do it, but as the price of oil keeps rising, coal and shale look better and better. However, this just makes the global warming problem worse.

What will we end up doing. You will actually get to watch the transition happen. Over the next 10 to 20 years, we are likely to see big changes in the world of oil. It will be fascinating to watch.