Petroleum

Function

The first internal combustion engines were steam engines, though, they worked with external combustion. The first engines with internal combustion were connected to the gas network. For a long time paraffin was looked at as a waste product of crude oil. The first specific drilling for crude oil took place in 1859 in Pennsylvania. It took only 20 metres to bump into crude oil. At the beginning of the motorisation Texas (USA) played a big role but lost its importance later on. A candidate for oil has always been (besides Venezuela) Russia where you might find nearly all kinds of raw materials. The countries of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and above all Iran have lots of crude oil. At the moment (2006), the Middle East delivers more crude oil than the rest of the world together. Crude oil transports demand - apart from the available pipelines - sometimes half of the worldwide ship capacity.

How it works

Deep drilled holes of far more than 1000 m take very long because they have to be interrupted over and over again due to exchanging the boring tool or stabilisation of the hole. For this, the complete pipe must be pulled out, be dismantled and put aside, until it can be used again. There is a relatively new technology with which it is possible to approach with flexible drills at least for already available holes other spots of a site.

At the beginning the crude oil is still under pressure, and for some freshly opened sites it escapes by itself, but after a certain time it must be helped along, for example by pumping in air, natural gas or also water through a second hole with big piston pumps. Crude oil can differ very much in terms of viscosity, also the colour can vary from bright to dark-black or deep brown.

Every second litre of petrol or diesel for Germany is brought with super tankers via Rotterdam. Such ships can transport up to 0.4 million tonnes of crude oil, costing less than one eurocent per litre. With big pumps it is sucked out of the tankers, and is either pumped directly to the refinery or into gigantic supply tanks. The pumping takes approx. 30 hours and is not without risk. Like an empty tank without liquids is more dangerous than a full one, dry tankers are also more dangerous than full ones. To the internal-European refineries the crude oil is transported by inland ship or pipeline. All together approx. 100 million tonnes are shipped via Rotterdam in the year 2006.