Just What is in Crude Oil?
Black crude is the basis upon which our way of life is built. We all know this now, but just what is crude oil? The answer might surprise you.
The Nature of Oil
Oil is often referred to as black gold. In truth, it is more like black diamonds. It is a finite resource that was formed during a period of extreme global warming on the planet. Much of the plant and animal life died, which resulted in material settling on the ground and slowly being buried. Over millions of years, it was buried further, heated up and pressurized. The end result was oil.
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Floaters
The sad news is most of the oil that was produced in this process was lost. The problem is oil is very light, certainly lighter than water. As a result, much of it migrated up to the surface of the planet and evaporated off. Even today, you can find small oil fires burning in certain areas of Nigeria or the Mideast where small deposits are leaking upwards.
Fields
If oil is so light, how do we find fields? This is where things get a big grim for the future. Most of the oil fields we find only exist because the oil got trapped under a geological formation it could not seep up through. The classic formation is a salt deposit. Indeed, the United States stores its strategic petroleum reserves in underground caverns hollowed out of giant salt deposits. The end result of these geological formations is usually a cap of something like salt with a layer of natural gas below it, then oil and then water. When the oil is discovered, a drill is sent down and a pipe inserted. Because of the pressure, the oil just comes up. As the pressure decreases, pumping must be undertaken. In some areas close to the ocean, such as Saudi Arabia, water will actually be pumped into the field in an effort to push any remaining oil up and out.
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Oil is Oil?
Unfortunately, not all oil is the same. There are many variations, but the basic breakdown is sweet light crude and sour heavy crude. As the name suggests, the sweet light crude is desirable because it is easy to process into other usable products like gasoline. Sour heavy crude is much more difficult and expensive to process. The problem we see in the world today is we are quickly running out of sweet crude, which means we must move to heavy crude. Wonder why we are a war in Libya, which produces only a couple million barrels of oil a day? All that oil is sweet crude, one of the few places left in the world where that happens. In contrast, Venezuela holds one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. Besides having a wacko dictator, the country has the problem that nearly all its reserves are of the heavy oil variety.
Just what is crude oil? It is the lifeblood of modern civilization. That being said, it is rather amazing almost none of us know nearly enough about it.
