50 Fun Facts About Fossil Fuels

Petroleum formed mainly from the buried remains of which organisms, cooked by heat and pressure?

Zooplankton and algae, not dinosaurs, are the raw material of oil. Their remains settled on ancient seabeds and were buried under sediment before heat and pressure slowly cooked them into crude.

An oil barrel, a standard firmly established by 1872, holds exactly how many US gallons?

42 US gallons, about 159 litres, is the oil barrel, though no physical barrel of that size is used to ship crude today. The 55-gallon steel drum people picture is a different container.

Which smelly additive was put in natural gas after the 1937 New London school explosion in Texas?

Mercaptan, an odorous compound also called thiol, was added to natural gas within weeks of the blast. Odourless gas had leaked under the school unnoticed, and Texas ordered all supplies odorised.

What happened to the price of WTI crude for May delivery on 20 April 2020, for the first time ever?

It turned negative, settling near minus $37 a barrel, because the main US storage hub was nearly full and nobody wanted to take delivery. Demand had collapsed during the pandemic.

Seawise Giant, at 458 metres the longest self-propelled ship ever built, was what kind of vessel?

An oil supertanker, Seawise Giant was longer than the Petronas Towers are tall and too deep-laden to use the Suez or Panama canals or the English Channel. It was later renamed Jahre Viking and Knock Nevis.

OPEC moved to which city in 1965, after Switzerland declined to extend its diplomatic privileges?

Vienna has hosted OPEC since 1 September 1965, after five years in Geneva. A decade later, in December 1975, the oil ministers were taken hostage at their Vienna conference.

Arab oil producers declared the October 1973 embargo on supporters of Israel during which war?

The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 triggered the OAPEC embargo, which targeted any country that had backed Israel at any point in the conflict. Prices soared and petrol queues followed.

Which oil magnate became America's first billionaire on 28 September 1916?

John D. Rockefeller crossed the billion-dollar mark in 1916, years after the courts had dismantled his trust. Standard Oil had centralised its decisions in a main office in Cleveland.

To ship natural gas by sea as LNG, it is chilled into a liquid at roughly what temperature?

About −162 °C turns natural gas into a liquid that can be shipped at close to atmospheric pressure in insulated tankers. The first such cargo crossed the Atlantic in 1959.

The word petroleum, Medieval Latin built from petra and oleum, literally means what?

Rock oil is the literal sense: petra is rock and oleum is oil, both borrowed from Greek. The firm that hired Edwin Drake to drill in 1859 began life as the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.

The Nord Stream pipelines, laid to carry Russian gas straight to Western Europe, run under which sea?

The Baltic Sea floor carries both Nord Stream pipelines, now disused. The project dates to 1997, when Gazprom and the Finnish oil company Neste formed a joint company to build a line across the sea.

Piper Alpha, whose 1988 blast killed 167 in the worst ever offshore oil disaster, stood in which sea?

The North Sea platform, 120 miles north-east of Aberdeen, was pumping about a tenth of the region's oil and gas when a gas leak ignited on the night of 6 July 1988. The rig was completely destroyed, and 30 of the dead were never found.

The Athabasca oil sands, one of Earth's biggest heavy-crude deposits, lie in which Canadian province?

Northeastern Alberta holds the Athabasca deposit, where sand, clay and water are soaked in bitumen, a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum. Significant bitumen deposits also lie in Kazakhstan, Russia and Venezuela.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the last coal-fired power station operating in the UK, shut down in which year?

2024 ended coal-fired electricity in the country that had pioneered it, when Ratcliffe-on-Soar closed on 30 September. Its last train of coal had been delivered that June.

Kerosene displaced which brighter-burning lamp fuel from American homes during the 1860s?

Whale oil, especially from sperm whales, had lit indoor lamps outside the gas-piped cities until kerosene undercut it. By the 1860s the American illuminating-oil industry had switched over completely to petroleum.

What festive nickname do drillers give the stack of valves and fittings fixed atop a completed well?

Christmas tree is the trade name for the stack of valves, casing spools and fittings that regulates flow from a finished well. Its valves are opened only once the well and its facilities are ready to receive oil or gas.

Which refining process, patented by Vladimir Shukhov in 1891, turns heavy oil fractions into petrol?

Cracking uses heat, pressure and often a catalyst to break long hydrocarbon chains into the shorter molecules petrol needs. In 1924 Sinclair Oil sent a delegation to Shukhov to confirm that Burton's American process matched his patents.

Crude oil is classed as 'sour' when it contains more than 0.5% by weight of which element?

Sulfur above 0.5% makes a crude sour; below that it is sweet, a label that dates from prospectors who tasted and smelled samples to judge quality. US rules now strictly limit sulfur in petrol and diesel.

Thomas Newcomen's 1712 atmospheric engine, the first practical steam-powered machine, did what job?

Pump water from mines is what Newcomen engines did across Britain and Europe, keeping flooded coal and metal workings dry. It was the first practical device to harness steam to produce mechanical work.

Which ancient people piped seeping natural gas through bamboo pipelines to boil brine for salt?

The Chinese ran gas from surface seeps along crude bamboo pipes to salt works in Sichuan's Ziliujing district, evaporating brine long before anyone drilled a gas well. The salt, not the gas, was the prize.

Which country, whose crude output first peaked in 1970, pumped more crude in 2023 than any nation ever had?

The United States pumped a record for any nation in history in 2023, decades after its first peak of 9.64 million barrels a day in 1970. The shale boom reversed what had looked like a permanent decline.

The 1910 Lakeview Gusher, the largest accidental oil spill in history, erupted in which US state?

California's Kern County took the flood: the blowout ran for 18 months and released about 9 million barrels of crude, far more than Deepwater Horizon. The site is now a state historical landmark.

Retreating Iraqi forces in 1991 set fire to roughly how many Kuwaiti oil wells?

About 700 is the usual figure, with estimates running from 605 to 732 wells, plus oil lakes and fire trenches set alight as the army withdrew. The EPA told Congress the army had set fire to or damaged over 700 wells, tanks and refineries.

Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded in 2010 while drilling for BP, was owned by which contractor?

Transocean owned the semi-submersible rig and leased it to BP; the blowout at the Macondo prospect on 20 April 2010 killed 11 workers and lit a fireball visible from 40 miles away. Hyundai had built it in South Korea in 2001.

In which year did the US Supreme Court find Standard Oil an illegal monopoly and order it broken up?

1911 was the year the Supreme Court ruled under the Sherman Act that Jersey Standard had to go, splitting off companies worth $375 million, 57% of its value. Chevron and BP both descend from the pieces.

Whose exposé 'The History of the Standard Oil Company' helped bring the government's antitrust charge?

Ida Tarbell's reporting laid out the railroad rebates and preferences the trust had used to crush rivals, and the Justice Department sued in November 1906 under the Sherman Act.

Which two oil companies were formed to develop production at Spindletop after its 1901 gusher?

Gulf Oil and Texaco, both now folded into Chevron, were start-ups born at Spindletop, where the Lucas gusher blew 100,000 barrels a day for nine days. They grew into serious rivals to Standard Oil.

Why did a backer style Edwin Drake, who struck oil at Titusville in 1859, as 'Colonel'?

To impress the locals was the whole idea: Drake had no military experience, but his backer Townsend gave him the title anyway. It stuck for life, and Vincent Price played Colonel Drake in a 1954 film.

Which nation's state-oil boss coined 'Seven Sisters' for the majors after they refused him membership?

Italy's Enrico Mattei, head of state-owned Eni, sought membership and was rejected, so he spread the 'Seven Sisters' tag for the majors that then dominated world oil. Eni remains Italy's energy champion.

Stanolind's 1947 Hugoton gas field experiment, the first hydraulic fracturing, was in which state?

Kansas hosted the trial in Grant County, in the state's south-west corner, two years before the first commercially successful treatments in 1949. The technique would take decades to reach shale.

Which Texas formation, first drilled by Mitchell Energy in 1981, became the cradle of the shale boom?

The Barnett Shale gave only meagre flows at first, but owner George P. Mitchell was convinced he could find a better way to produce gas from it. His persistence proved that shale could pay.

Why did the Dutch halt extraction at Groningen, Europe's largest methane field, in October 2023?

Earthquakes induced by the shrinking reservoir had rattled the province since 1991, damaging houses and stirring unrest, so in June 2023 the government ordered extraction to cease by 1 October. The field held 2,740 billion cubic metres.

Methane Pioneer's first LNG cargo, landed at Canvey Island in 1959, had been loaded in which US state?

Louisiana's Calcasieu River was the loading point for the 27-day Atlantic crossing, on a converted 1945 cargo ship that had already carried three other names. It ran the route until 1972.

Brent crude, the benchmark that prices about 80% of world oil trade, takes its name from which bird?

A goose, the brent goose, gave the field its name because Shell named its UK fields after seabirds in alphabetical order of discovery: Auk, Brent, Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar and so on. The field was found in 1971.

West Texas Intermediate, the US crude benchmark, is priced for delivery at Cushing in which state?

Oklahoma's Cushing hub is where WTI is traded and delivered, even though the grade was historically defined by local trade around Midland, Texas. Pipelines now bring blended crude of other grades there too.

The first coal-fired public power station, at London's Holborn Viaduct, began running in which year?

1882 saw Edison's Holborn Viaduct plant switch on on 12 January, three years after the carbon-filament bulb and just two months after a Godalming water wheel gave the world its first public electricity supply.

The Universal Colliery explosion at Senghenydd, Wales, which killed 439 miners, struck in which year?

1913, on 14 October, was when the blast tore through the pit near Caerphilly; a rescuer also died, and an official count on 20 November still listed 33 men unaccounted for. It remains the worst mining accident in British history.

Trans-Alaska Pipeline, its 800 miles of pipe ordered from Japan in 1969, first flowed in which year?

1977 brought the first barrel to Valdez on 28 July, after a construction effort that employed tens of thousands. Since then Alaska's state government has lived largely on taxes from oil producers and shippers.

American coal output peaked at about 1.17 billion short tons in which year, before falling by half?

2008 was the high-water mark, far later than most people guess; by 2016 output was already down 37% and by 2023 about 50%. The decline was unevenly spread across the coalfields.

Which two countries launched the Powering Past Coal Alliance at the COP23 summit in 2017?

Canada and the UK founded the alliance to push the phase-out of unabated coal power, and it runs with financial support from Canada's environment department, Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Lignite supplied 27% of which country's electricity in 2014, when it was the world's top producer of the brown coal?

Germany led the world in lignite output through the mid-2010s, and in 2014 the brown coal still gave the country 12% of its energy. East Germany had been the top producer for much of its existence as a state.

Which country's Sasol, founded in 1950, turns coal into petrol and diesel on an industrial scale?

South Africa's Sasol was built around coal liquefaction processes that German chemists had first developed in the early 1900s, using the Fischer–Tropsch route. The company is now based in Sandton.

Who told the American Petroleum Institute in 1956 that American oil output would peak around 1970?

M. King Hubbert proposed that production from any region follows a roughly bell-shaped curve, and his forecast of a peak around 1965–1970 proved correct for conventional crude in the continental US. 'Peak oil' is his legacy.

Which Nova Scotian doctor and geologist made lamp oil from coal in the 1840s and named it kerosene?

Abraham Gesner first showed off his new lamp fuel in public in August 1846 during lectures in Charlottetown. His coal oil would soon be made far more cheaply from petroleum instead.

Which pharmacist invented the modern kerosene lamp in 1853 and opened the first modern oil well in 1854?

Ignacy Łukasiewicz worked out how to distil kerosene from seep oil, lit Europe's first modern street lamp in 1853 and opened his oil 'mine' at Bóbrka near Krosno, still operating in 2020. He later founded a spa resort there.

Which city's wells, crammed into six square miles, produced more than half the world's oil by 1901?

Baku, on the Caspian, out-produced the whole of America between 1898 and 1901, and its 11 million tons a year made up 55% of all Russian oil. Another 1.2 million tons of Baku kerosene went abroad.

In coal's rank sequence, which grade forms immediately above lignite as heat and pressure increase?

Sub-bituminous coal comes next, then bituminous and finally anthracite, each produced with rising temperature and pressure; lignite forms under the mildest conditions. Lower ranks are also the most harmful to health when burned.

The older half of the Carboniferous in North America is which period, named for a river valley's limestone?

Mississippian rocks are the lower, carbonate-rich sequence; the coal-rich Pennsylvanian sits above them. Alexander Winchell proposed the name in 1870 after the limestone exposed along the upper Mississippi River valley.

What is the organic matter in source rocks called that releases oil when heated to around 50–150 °C?

Kerogen releases crude oil in the 'oil window' of roughly 50–150 °C and natural gas in a hotter window of 150–200 °C, depending on how quickly the rock is heated. Both petroleum and natural gas form from it.

Which Paris-based body was founded in November 1974 to shield oil importers from another supply shock?

The International Energy Agency was set up on 18 November 1974, after the 1973 oil crisis, to help ensure reliable energy supplies; France notably stayed out of the preliminary draft. It advises governments on energy policy.