­bricants for machinery and raw materials for a num­ber of manufacturing industries.In comparison with other fuels, such as coal, it has several advantages: it occurs in great abundance; it is easily obtained; it can be cheaply distributed; and above all, it has the widest range of domestic as well as industrial uses. It is often, therefore, referred to as ‘black gold’.Despite repeated predictions of its rapid exhaustion, world petroleum production increases every year. Scientists and geo- physicists, using modern prospecting equipment such as the gravimeter, magnetometer and seismograph are discovering more and more new oilfields and are greatly widening the world’s known reserves of oil. Many of the most recently discovered fields are deep beneath the sea-floor.The word petroleum is derived from the Latin words petra, meaning rock, and oleum, meaning oil. It is so called because it is derived from the rocks, where it flows freely in either liquid or gaseous state. It was first used where seepages occurred at the sur­face. In ancient times the Chinese, who encountered oil in drilling for salt in brine wells, used it as fuel to evaporate the brine.The Egyptians used it for em­balming the dead before burial. The Bible notes that dark pitch from petroleum residues was used on Noah’s ark to make the wooden vessel waterproof. It was also recorded that tar (bitumen) was employed in cementing bricks in the construction of the Tower of Babylon, and in paving the streets in Mesopotamia.Petroleum was also mentioned by many Greek and Roman writers who noted its use as lamp fuel and for ointments. In many other parts of the world such as around the Caspian Sea, in Romania, in Burma and in India, oil was often used in lighting, cooking, lubricat­ing and for medical purposes.But the first man to have really ‘struck oil’ was probably Samuel M. Kier who in 1848 found it by chance in wells on the banks of the Allegheny River of Pennsylvania. He named it after the local Indians as Seneca oil. The shortage of whale oil, then widely used for domestic lighting and for oiling machinery, created a great demand for mineral oil.

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