When retired railroad conductor Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, he touched off the modern oil industry. For the next 40 years the primary interest in oil was as a source of kerosene, used for lighting lamps. Then came the automobile and the realization that the internal combustion engine ran best on gasoline, a byproduct of the process of extracting kerosene from crude oil. As the demand grew for gasoline to power not only cars but also internal combustion engines of all kinds, chemical engineers honing their refining techniques discovered a host of useful byproducts of crude—and the petrochemical industry was born. Oil had truly become black gold.
| 1901 |
North America’s first oil gusher North America’s first oil gusher blows at the Spindletop field near Beaumont in southeastern Texas, spraying more than 800,000 barrels of crude into the air before it can be brought under control. The strike boosts the yearly oil output in the United States from 2,000 barrels in 1859 to more than 65 million barrels by 1901. |
| 1913 |
High-pressure hydrogenation process developed German organic chemist Friedrich Bergius develops a high-pressure hydrogenation process that transforms heavy oil and oil residues into lighter oils, boosting gasoline production. In 1926 IG Farben Industries, where Carl Bosch had been developing similar high-pressure processes, acquires the patent rights to the Bergius process. Bergius and Bosch share a Nobel Prize in 1931. |
| 1913 |
New method of oil refining Chemical engineers William Burton and Robert Humphreys of Standard Oil patent a method of oil refining that significantly increases gasoline yields. Known as thermal cracking, the chemists discover that by applying both heat and pressure during distillation, heavier petroleum molecules can be broken down, or cracked, into gasoline’s lighter molecules. The discovery is a boon to the new auto industry, whose fuel of choice is gasoline. |
| 1920s |
Fischer-Tropsch method By using fractional distillation, two German coal researchers create synthetic gasoline. Known as the Fischer-Tropsch method, the gasoline is produced by combining either coke and steam or crushed coal and heavy oil, then exposing the mixture to a catalyst to form synthetic gasoline. The process plays a critical role in helping to meet the increasing demand for gasoline as automobiles come into widespread use and later for easing gasoline shortages during World War II. |
| 1920s - 1940s |
Nylon, acrylics, and polyester are developed An assortment of new compounds derived from byproducts of the oil-refining process enter the market. Three of the most promising new materials—synthesized from the hydrocarbon ethylene—are polystyrene, a brittle plastic known also as styrofoam; polyvinyl chloride, used in plumbing fixtures and weather-resistant home siding; and polyethylene, which is flexible inexpensive, and widely used in packaging. New synthetic fibers and resins are also introduced, including nylon, acrylics, and polyester, and are used to make everything from clothing and sports gear to industrial equipment, parachutes, and plexiglass. |
| 1920s - 1940s |
New compounds derived oil-refining byproducts enter market An assortment of new compounds derived from byproducts of the oil-refining process enter the market. Three of the most promising new materials—synthesized from the hydrocarbon ethylene—are polystyrene, a brittle plastic known also as styrofoam; polyvinyl chloride, used in plumbing fixtures and weather-resistant home siding; and polyethylene, which is flexible, inexpensive, and widely used in packaging. New synthetic fibers and resins are also introduced, including nylon, acrylics, and polyester, and are used to make everything from clothing and sports gear to industrial equipment, parachutes, and plexiglass. |
| 1921 |
Lead added to gasoline Charles Kettering of General Motors and his assistants, organic chemists Thomas Midgley, Jr., and T. A. Boyd, discover that adding lead to gasoline eliminates engine knock. Until the 1970s, when environmental concerns forced its removal, tetraethyl lead was a standard ingredient in gasoline. |
| 1928 |
Portable offshore drilling By mounting a derrick and drilling outfit onto a submersible barge, Texas oilman Louis Giliasso creates an efficient portable method of offshore drilling. The transportable barge allows a rig to be erected in as little as a day, which makes for easier exploration of the Texas and Louisiana coastal wetlands. More permanent offshore piers and platforms had been successfully operating since the late 1800s off the coast of California near Santa Barbara, where oil seepage in the Pacific had been reported by Spanish explorers as early as 1542. |
| 1930s |
New process increases octane rating gasoline U.S. refineries take advantage of a new process of alkalinization and fine-powder fluid-bed production that increases the octane rating of aviation gasoline to 100. This becomes important in the success of the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II. |
| 1936 |
Catalytic cracking introduced French scientist Eugene Houdry introduces catalytic cracking. By using silica and alumina-based catalysts, he demonstrates not only that more gasoline can be produced from oil without the use of high pressure but also that it has a higher octane rating and burns more efficiently. |
| 1942 |
First catalytic cracking unit is put on-stream The first catalytic cracking unit is put on-stream in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by Standard Oil, New Jersey. |
| 1947 |
Platforming invented German-born American chemical engineer Vladimir Haensel invents platforming, a process for producing cleaner-burning high-octane fuels using a platinum catalyst to speed up certain chemical reactions. Platforming eliminates the need to add lead to gasoline. |
| 1947 |
First commercial oil well out of sight of land A consortium of oil companies led by Kerr-McGee drills the world’s first commercial oil well out of sight of land in the Gulf of Mexico, 10.5 miles offshore and 45 miles south of Morgan City, Louisiana. Eleven oil fields are mapped in the gulf by 1949, with 44 exploratory wells in operation. |
| 1955 |
First jack-up oil-drilling rig The first jack-up oil-drilling rig is designed for offshore exploration. The rig features long legs that can be lowered into the seabed to a depth of 500 feet, allowing the platform to be raised to various heights above the level of the water. |
| 1960s |
Synthetic oils Synthetic oils are in development to meet the special lubricating requirements of military jets. Mobil Oil and AMSOIL are leaders in this field; their synthetics contain such additives as polyalphaolefins, derived from olefin, one of the three primary petrochemical groups. Saturated with hydrogen, olefin-carbon molecules provide excellent thermal stability. Following on the success of synthetic oils in military applications, they are introduced into the commercial market in the 1970s for use in automobiles. |
| 1970s |
Digital seismology The introduction of digital seismology in oil exploration increases accuracy in locating underground pools of oil. The technique of using seismic waves to look for oil is based on determining the time interval between the sending of a sound wave (generated by an explosion, an electric vibrator, or a falling weight) and the arrival of reflected or refracted waves at one or more seismic detectors. Analysis of differences in arrival times and amplitudes of the waves tells seismologists what kinds of rock the waves have traveled through. |
| 1970s |
Mud pulse telemetry Teleco, Inc., of Greenville, South Carolina, and the U.S. Department of Energy introduce mud pulse telemetry, a system of relaying pressure pulses through drilling mud to convey the location of the drill bit. Mud pulse telemetry is now an oil industry standard, saving millions of dollars in time and labor. |
| 1980s |
ROVs developed for subsea oil work Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are developed for subsea oil work. Controlled from the surface, ROVs vary from beachball-size cameras to truck-size maintenance robots. |
| 1990s |
New tools and techniques to reduce the costs and risks of drilling The combined efforts of private industry, the Department of Energy, and national laboratories such as Argonne and Lawrence Livermore result in the introduction of several new tools and techniques designed to reduce the costs and risks of drilling, including reducing potential damage to the geological formation and improving environmental protection. Among such tools are the near-bit sensor, which gathers data from just behind the drill bit and transmits it to the surface, and carbon dioxide/sand fracturing stimulation, a technique that allows for non-damaging stimulation of a natural gas formation. |
| 2000 |
Hoover-Diana goes into operation The Hoover-Diana, a 63,000-ton deep-draft caisson vessel, goes into operation in the Gulf of Mexico. A joint venture by Exxon Mobil and BP, it is a production platform mounted atop a floating cylindrical concrete tube anchored in 4,800 feet of water. The entire structure is 83 stories high, with 90 percent of it below the surface. Within half a year it is producing 20,000 barrels of oil and 220 million cubic feet of gas a day. Two pipelines carry the oil and gas to shore. |
The captains of the oil industry were among the most successful entrepreneurs of any century, reaping huge profits from oil, natural gas, and their byproducts and building business empires that soared to capitalism's heights. Oil even became a factor in some of the most complex geopolitical struggles in the last quarter of the 20th century, ones still playing out today.
Oil has touched all our lives in other ways as well. Transformed into petrochemicals, it is all around us, in just about every modern manufactured thing, from the clothes we wear and the medicines we take to the materials that make up our computers, countertops, toothbrushes, running shoes, car bumpers, grocery bags, flooring tiles, and on and on and on. Indeed, the products from petrochemicals have played as great a role in shaping the modern world as gasoline and fuel oils have in powering it.
It seems at first a chicken-and-egg sort of question: Which came first—the gas pump or the car pulling up to it? Gasoline was around before the invention of the internal combustion engine but for many years was considered a useless byproduct of the refining of crude oil to make kerosene, a standard fuel for lamps through much of the 19th century. Oil refining of the day—and into the first years of the 20th century—relied on a relatively simple distillation process that separated crude oil into portions, called fractions, of different hydrocarbon compounds (molecules consisting of varying arrangements of carbon and hydrogen atoms) with different boiling points. Heavier kerosene, with more carbon atoms per molecule and a higher boiling point, was thus easily separated from lighter gasoline, with fewer atoms and a lower boiling point, as well as from other hydrocarbon compounds and impurities in the crude oil mix. Kerosene was the keeper; gasoline and other compounds as well as natural gas that was often found alongside oil deposits, were often just burned off.
Then in the first 2 decades of the 20th century horseless carriages in increasing droves came looking for fuel. Researchers had found early on that the internal combustion engine ran best on light fuels like gasoline but distillation refining just didn't produce enough of it—only about 20 percent gasoline from a given amount of crude petroleum. Even as oil prospectors extended the range of productive wells from Pennsylvania through Indiana and into the vast oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, the inherent inefficiency of the existing refining process was almost threatening to hold back the automotive industry with gasoline shortages.
The problem was solved by a pair of chemical engineers at Standard Oil of Indiana—company vice president William Burton and Robert Humphreys, head of the lab at the Whiting refinery, the world's largest at the time. Burton and Humphreys had tried and failed to extract more gasoline from crude by adding chemical catalysts, but then Burton had an idea and directed Humphreys to add pressure to the standard heating process used in distillation. Under both heat and pressure, it turned out that heavier molecules of kerosene, with up to 16 carbon atoms per molecule, "cracked" into lighter molecules such as those of gasoline, with 4 to 12 carbons per molecule, Thermal cracking, as the process came to be called, doubled the efficiency of refining, yielding 40 percent gasoline. Burton was issued a patent for the process in 1913, and soon the pumps were keeping pace with the ever-increasing automobile demand.
In the next decades other chemical engineers improved the refining process even further. In the 1920s Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley, who would later develop Freon (see Air Conditioning and Refrigeration), discovered that adding a form of lead to gasoline made it burn smoothly, preventing the unwanted detonations that caused engine knocking. Tetraethyl lead was a standard ingredient of almost all gasolines until the 1970s, when environmental concerns led to the development of efficiently burning gasolines that didn't require lead. Another major breakthrough was catalytic cracking, the challenge that had escaped Burton and Humphreys. In the 1930s a Frenchman named Eugene Houdry perfected a process using certain silica and alumina-based catalysts that produced even more gasoline through cracking and didn't require high pressure. In addition, catalytic cracking produced forms of gasoline that burned more efficiently.
Different forms of all sorts of things were coming out of refineries, driven in part by the demands of war. Houdry had also invented a catalytic process for crude oil that yielded butadiene, a hydrocarbon compound with some interesting characteristics. In the years before and during World War II it became one of two key ingredients in the production of synthetic rubber, an especially vital commodity as the war in the Pacific cut off supplies of natural rubber. The stage was now set for a revolution in petrochemical technology. As the war drove up demands for both gasoline and heavier aviation fuels, supplies of byproduct compounds—known as feedstocks—were increasing. At the same time, chemical engineers working in research labs were finding potential new uses for just those feedstocks, which they were beginning to see as vast untapped sources of raw material.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s chemical companies in Europe and the United States, working largely with byproducts of the distillation of coal tar, announced the creation of a wide assortment of new compounds with a variety of characteristics that had the common property of being easily molded—and thus were soon known simply as plastics. Engineering these new compounds for specific attributes was a matter of continual experimentation with chemical processes and combinations of different molecules. Many of the breakthroughs involved the creation of polymers—larger, more complex molecules consisting of smaller molecules chemically bound together, usually through the action of a catalyst. Sometimes the results would be a surprise, yielding a material with unexpected characteristics or fresh insights into what might be possible. Among the most important advances was the discovery of a whole class of plastics that could be remolded after heating, an achievement that would ultimately lead to the widespread recycling of plastics.
Three of the most promising new materials—polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and polyethylene—were synthesized from the same hydrocarbon: ethylene, a relatively rare byproduct of standard petroleum refinery processes. But there, in those ever-increasing feedstocks, were virtually limitless quantities of ethylene just waiting to be cracked. And here also was a moment of serendipity: readily available raw material, a wide range of products to be made from it, and a world of consumers coming out of years of war eager to start the world afresh, preferably with brand-new things.
Plastics and their petrochemical cousins, synthetic fibers, filled the bill. From injection-molded polystyrene products like combs and cutlery, PVC piping, and the ubiquitous polyethylene shopping bags and food storage containers to the polyesters, the acrylics, and nylon, all were within consumers' easy reach. Indeed, synthetic textiles became inexpensive enough to eventually capture half of the entire fiber market. All credit was owed to the ready feedstock supplies.
But those supplies were not as limitless as they had once seemed. With demand for petroleum—both as a fuel and in its many other synthesized forms—skyrocketing, America and other Western countries turned more and more to foreign sources, chiefly in the Middle East. At the same time, oil companies continued to search for and develop new sources, including vast undersea deposits in the Gulf of Mexico and later the North Sea. Offshore drilling presented a whole new set of challenges to petroleum engineers, who responded with some truly amazing constructions, including floating platforms designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and waves. One derrick in the North Sea called "Troll" stands in 1,000 feet of water and rises 1,500 feet above the surface. It is, with the Great Wall of China, one of only two human-made structures visible from the Moon.
One way or another, the oil continued to flow. In 1900 some 150 million barrels of oil were pumped worldwide. By 2000 world production stood at 22 billion barrels—a day. But a series of crises in the 1970s, including the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and an increasing awareness of the environmental hazards posed by fossil fuels, brought more changes to the industry. Concern over an assured supply of fossil fuel encouraged prospectors, for instance, to develop new techniques for finding oil, including using the seismic waves produced artificially by literally thumping the ground to create three-dimensional images that brought hidden underground deposits into clear view and greatly reduced the fruitless drilling of so-called dry holes. Engineers developed new types of drills that not only reached deeper into the earth—some extending several miles below the surface—but could also tunnel horizontally for thousands of feet, reaching otherwise inaccessible deposits. Known reserves were squeezed as dry as they could be with innovative processes that washed oil out with injected water or chemicals and induced thermal energy. Refineries continued to find better ways to crack crude oil into more and better fuels and even developed other techniques such as reforming, which did the opposite of cracking, fashioning just-right molecules from smaller bits and pieces. And perhaps most significantly of all, natural gas—so often found with oil deposits—was finally recognized as a valuable fuel in its own right, becoming an economically significant energy source beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Initially attractive because it was cheap and relatively abundant, natural gas also held the advantage of being cleaner burning and far less damaging to the environment, factors that became increasingly important with the passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1970s. Indeed, natural gas has replaced crude oil as the most important source of petrochemical feedstocks.
Petrochemical and automotive engineers had already responded to environmental concerns in a variety of ways. As early as the 1940s German émigré Vladimir Haensel invented a type of reforming refining process called platforming that used very small amounts of platinum as a catalyst and produced high-octane, efficient-burning fuel without the use of lead. Haensel's process, which was eventually recognized as one of the most significant chemical engineering technologies of the past 50 years, made the addition of lead to gasoline no longer necessary. Today, more than 85 percent of the gasoline produced worldwide is derived from platforming.
Also well ahead of the environmental curve was Eugene Houdry, who had developed catalytic cracking; in 1956 he invented the catalytic converter, a device that removed some of the most harmful pollutants from automobile exhaust and that ultimately became standard equipment on every car in the United States. Other engineers also developed methods for removing more impurities, such as sulfur, during refining, making the process itself a cleaner affair. For its part, natural gas was readily adopted as an alternative to home heating oil and has also been used in some cities as the fuel for fleets of buses and taxicabs, reducing urban pollution. Environmental concerns have also affected the other side of the petrochemical business, leading to sophisticated processes for recycling existing plastic products.
Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, petroleum replaced coal as the dominant fuel in the United States, and petroleum processing technologies allowed petrochemicals to replace environmentally harmful coal tar chemistry. The next half-century saw this dominance continue and even take on new forms, as plastics and synthetic fibers entered the consumer marketplace. Despite increasingly complex challenges, new generations of researchers and engineers have continued to keep the black gold bonanza in full swing.
Lee R. Raymond
Chairman and CEO
Exxon Mobil Corporation
My first major academic interest was chemical engineering, which I studied as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. I liked the subject so well that I decided to pursue a doctorate in it, but this time at the University of Minnesota. It was the top-ranked graduate school and also a bit closer to where I grew up in Watertown, South Dakota.
I've always been amused when people act surprised about where I grew up, since they seem to think that South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are like Siberia. But I'm proud of my roots. It's my feeling that people who come out of America's heartland have strong beliefs in fundamental values, in education, and in a commitment to do a good job.
Perhaps the thing that appealed most to me about being an engineer was a curiosity about how things are designed and built. I'm fascinated by technology and by the research that underpins the incredible technical advances we see all around us.
After getting my doctorate, I decided to take a research job with what was then the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) because it seemed like a good way to quickly broaden my experience. At the time I joined Jersey, I thought I would eventually be returning to academic life. That was 40 years ago, and I just never made the trip back to academia.
One reason is that I found a company that both satisfied my curiosity and fulfilled my abiding interest in technology. I was able to work in a company committed to R&D, a place where I was exposed to stimulating colleagues and many areas of research and, above all, a place where what we worked on had practical applications of benefit to people. The experience has been exhilarating, and even though it's been a long time since I have been asked to do practical engineering, I am still drawn to being able to work in a place that puts technology at the forefront of its activities. I have also found management in the petroleum industry to be both challenging and rewarding. I derive my greatest sense of accomplishment from watching people develop and grow in competence, in seeing them take on difficult challenges and master them.
Of course, even though I am no longer a practicing engineer, I see many aspects of the energy business where the skills and perspectives of an engineer are vital. For example, I think I can sense the sorts of projects that are likely to be achievable and those that lie beyond what is doable, at least in the short to medium term. An engineering background also has helped in assessing areas of public policy where the science and technology that some people are enthusiastic about may not yet be mature enough to rely on and yet in other areas it is within reach.
A science and engineering background gives me enormous faith and confidence in the power of technology. No one who has lived their entire professional life in an industry like petroleum can escape a sense of awe at what has been achieved technically and at the benefits that have come from that technological power. My experiences have also given me a huge sense of optimism about the innovations we are likely to see in the future.