Oil and gas production handbook An introduction to oil ... - ABB Group

industry; it only started to grow in the 1940s, more than 80 years after the
drilling of the first commercial oil well.
During World War II, the demand for synthetic materials to replace costly
and sometimes less efficient products caused the petrochemical industry to
develop into a major player in modern economy and society.
Before then, it was a tentative, experimental sector, starting with basic
materials:
• Synthetic rubbers in the 1900s
• Bakelite, the first petrochemical-derived plastic, in 1907
• First petrochemical solvents in the 1920s
• Polystyrene in the 1930s
And it then moved to an incredible variety of areas:
• Household goods (kitchen appliances, textiles, furniture)
• Medicine (heart pacemakers, transfusion bags)
• Leisure (running shoes, computers...)
• Highly specialized fields like archaeology and crime detection
With oil prices of $100 a barrel or more, even more difficult-to-access
sources have become economically viable. Such sources include tar sands
in Venezuela and Canada, shale oil and gas in the US (and developing
elsewhere), coal bed methane and synthetic diesel (syndiesel) from natural
gas, and biodiesel and bioethanol from biological sources have seen a
dramatic increase over the last ten years. These sources may eventually
more than triple the potential reserves of hydrocarbon fuels. Beyond that,
there are even more exotic sources, such as methane hydrates, that some
experts claim can double available resources once more.
With increasing consumption and ever-increasing conventional and
unconventional resources, the challenge becomes not one of availability, but
of sustainable use of fossil fuels in the face of rising environmental impacts,
that range from local pollution to global climate effects.
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