25 YEARS OF OIL

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1688, 19 November 1925, Page 6

25 YEARS OF OIL

There is a strange 'coincidence in the fact that the appointment of a commission to bring the coal industry back to life should agree almost to a month with the twenty-fifth birtnday of the oil age. Oil has not yet caught up its three big brothers, of whom coal is one and iron and steel the other two, but it can surely boast of a more meteoric career, says the Scotsman. Young though the oil industry be, it has already become one of the world's great industries; within the brief space of a quarter of a century it has grown to huge proportions. Since 1900 it has increased its production of crude oil by 600 per cent; its refinery output of petrol by 1400 per cent; the capital invested in the business of oil producing, refinI ery, transporting, and marketing by ' 10G0 per cent. These figures represent a revolution —the revolution in transport on land, sea, and air affected by the development of the petrol engine. Twentyfive years ago anyone sailing past the coast of Sumartra would have seen a large column of smoke ascending to the heavens. It was the smoke from the petrol, unsaleable at any price, that was being pumped out into the jungle and' burned. At some refineries in America at that time men used secretly to open the petrol tanks at night and let the petrol flow into the river, for twenty-five years ago the chief business of the oil refiner was to refine the crude oil into lamp oil (kerosene) without including therein the more volatile fractions (petrol) which would make the domestic lamp* explode. Last year the oil industry manufactured over 270,000,000 barrels of petrol! Such is the extent of the revolution effected by this new 'demand. Wells are now sunk over a mile deep; oil is pumped from the very bowels of the earth. And in order to get last year's petrol supply of 270,000,000 barrels the oil industry had to produce 730,000,000 barrels of other oils, the remaining products of the crude oil.

How have these been disposed of? Since the beginning of this century the large oil organisations have steadily developed the uses of fuel oil, the main residual product of the refinery s'tiil. Fuel oil, burned under boilers in place of coal, gives enormous advantages to the steamship—savings in fuel, savings in bunker space, a greater radius of voyage without bunkering, and so on. Since the war all the big passenger liners of the world have been converted! from coal to oil burning. So rapidly have the uses of fuel oil developed that it. is not only being burned under ship's boilers, but in factories, electricity plants, railway locomotives and even in hotels and homes for heating. The achievement has been tremendous; nor can anyone say that the changes of the next quarter of a century will not be equally revolutionary. The Diesel engine, which explodes a heavy oil by compression, is fast supplanting the steamship and may yet supplant the petrol engine. If this happens once again the function of the oil industry will change. In another 25 years its business may be to produce not petrol, but Diesel oil or some other oil for a new type of internal combustion engine. A new kind of oil age may be upon us.