Oil

An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is a viscous liquid at ambient temperatures and is both hydrophobic (immiscible with water, literally "water fearing") and lipophilic (miscible with other oils, literally "fat loving"). Oils have a high carbon and hydrogen content and are usually flammable and surface active.

Quotes

Oil, generally

• We’re calling it a ready and release plan. This allows us to move quickly to prevent oil price spikes and respond to international events
  • President Biden U.S. sells oil reserves as Biden tackles pump prices ahead of elections (4 minute readOctober 19, 20226:08 PM PDTLast Updated 17 days ago)

• Sweet oil, the fragrance of the gods, mixed oil, pressed oil, aromatic oil, cedar oil for offerings are mine.
  • Lahar, in Debate between sheep and grain (mid to late 3rd millennium BCE) [1]

• Enki sets up for you the lustration rituals created in his abzu; Kusu establishes the lustration rituals created in their specific house -- the oven for oxen, sheep and bread beside the interior of the bathing chamber, those sacred lustration rituals beside the shrine!
  
  Kusu purifies the oil for the house. It is placed in readiness [...] to ensure the sacred lustration rituals are not neglected, from the majestic marshes, the vast, sacred bathing chamber, this destiny emerges: the E-kic-nu-jal, with its majestic, sacred dais, perfects the great, majestic divine powers of heaven and earth. You bathe on the majestic banks by the sacred bathing chamber; you put mountain oil on your sacred body; O Nanna, you are placed upon your majestic dais -- wrapped in majestic linen, with raised head, shining horns and the pectoral of lordship!
  
  With the majestic oil of the sacred body, the oil of lordship, oil from your great treasury, lord Ningublaga consecrates the hands on his lapis-lazuli quay, the majestic quay, the sacred quay. But from Eridug the stag of the abzu Enki purifies the oil for those hands. So that you should place sacred hands upon your offering table in the banqueting hall, the great place, your steward Kusu -- she who purifies hands and cleanses hands -- consecrates the hands. But from Eridug the stag of the abzu purifies the oil for those hands.
  • About Nanna, A hymn to Nanna (Nanna E), anonymous author, late 3rd millennium BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

• [the blockade puts emergency access at risk for more than 500 workers, and threatens] good faith commitments made between the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and the Province of B.C. to develop a new relationship based on respect
  • Mike Farnworth B.C. public safety minister condemns blockade at Coastal GasLink pipeline site (Nov. 16, 2021 or February 5, 2018? see image at beginning of article)

• With the continued deterioration of weather conditions in the region in the coming days, Trans Mountain is closely monitoring the situation to ensure our crews can continue to progress safely
  • Trans Mountain Corp Intense weather heads for B.C., slows pipeline restart as prime minister to visit (November 26, 2021)

Specific types

Petroleum

"Anybody who follows the oil industry will tell you that it doesn't make any difference where the oil comes from," says Keith Crane, an energy expert at RAND Corp.
Global oil markets are so intertwined, Crane says, that changes in any one part of the system can trigger effects elsewhere. ~ Corey Flintoff

See also: Petroleum engineering

• "Anybody who follows the oil industry will tell you that it doesn't make any difference where the oil comes from," says Keith Crane, an energy expert at RAND Corp.
  Global oil markets are so intertwined, Crane says, that changes in any one part of the system can trigger effects elsewhere.
  He points out that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Iran and therefore does not import its oil. But "if Iranian oil goes off the [world] market, it still affects the price in the United States," Crane says.
  • Corey Flintoff, “Where Does America Get Oil? You May Be Surprised”, NPR, (April 12, 2012).

• To ask the question "What is oil?" is almost like asking "What is love?"
  • John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947), page 57.
• What he has said is we'll continue to rely on Persian Gulf oil and if necessary sacrifice American lives in a fight for that oil. I don't think we ought to lose American lives fighting for someone else's oil. Because a war in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf - all we'll get is war and we won't get oil. And we'll lose a lot of American lives in the process.
  • Gary Hart, Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate at Columbia University in New York City, (28 March 1984)

• The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century.
  • Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah's Story (1980), page 59.

Our oil supply is secure, not because our government threatens to use force against those who would make it insecure, but because the world’s oil suppliers want to make money. ~ David R. Henderson

• Our oil supply is secure, not because our government threatens to use force against those who would make it insecure, but because the world’s oil suppliers want to make money.
  • David R. Henderson, as quoted in Handbook of Oil Politics, edit. Robert E. Looney, Routledge, Chap. 11 “Do Governments need to Go to War for Oil?” (2012) p. 144.

• I think Arctic drilling is insane. I think that countries around the world would be very well advised to put restrictions on drilling for oil in the Arctic ocean.
  • Al Gore, as quoted in the Guardian in 16 July 2015.

• As one approaches nearer to the country of the Cats, one finds heavy and thick water, which ignites like brandy, and boils up in bubbles of flame when fire is applied to it. It is, moreover, so oily, that all our Savages use it to anoint and grease their heads and their bodies.
  • The Jesuit Relations of 1657 edited by Le Jeune, as qtd. in Old Frontier of France: The Niagara Region and Adjacent Lakes Under French Control Volume 1”, by Frank Hayward Severance, (1917), p. 294.

• The place where we meet with it is called Ganos; where an officer worthy of credit [Joncaire] assured me that he had seen a fountain, the water of which is like oil and has the taste of iron. He said also that a little further there is another fountain exactly like it, and that the savages make use of its waters to appease all manner of pains.
  • Chabert Joncaire, as qtd in Old Frontier of France: The Niagara Region and Adjacent Lakes Under French Control Volume 1”, by Frank Hayward Severance, (1917), p. 294.

• In 1991, Landsat captured the devastating environmental consequences of war. As Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait, they set fire to over 650 oil wells and damaged almost 75 more, which then spewed crude oil across the desert and into the Persian Gulf.
  Fires burned for ten months. According to a 2009 study published in Disaster Prevention and Management, firefighting crews from ten countries, part of a response team that comprised approximately 11,450 workers from 38 countries, used familiar and also never-before-tested technologies to put out the fires. When the last one was extinguished in November, about 300 lakes of oil remained, as well as a layer of soot and oil that fell out of the sky and mixed with sand and gravel to form 'tarcrete' across 5 percent of Kuwait's landscape.
• An estimated one to 1.5 billion barrels of oil were released into the environment. After most burned, 25 to 40 million barrels ended up spread across the desert and 11 million barrels in the Persian Gulf, according to a 2012 paper published in Remote Sensing of Environment. For comparison, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the Gulf of Mexico is estimated to have released nearly 5 million barrels of oil. Kuwait's landscape has recovered somewhat. Clean up efforts have removed 21 million barrels of oil from the desert, but an estimated 1 million barrels still remain.
  • NASA, “Landsat Top Ten - Kuwait Oil Fires”, (07.23.12).

• I’ve said many times that there isn’t a country in the world that would find billions of barrels of oil and leave it in the ground while there is a market for it.
  • Justin Trudeau, speaking about the Trans Mountain Pipeline. As quoted by The Guardian, Canada approves controversial Kinder Morgan oil pipeline (30 November 2016).
• The most important strategic resource during the Cold War was oil. The first half of the twentieth century had seen its rise from a minor source of energy to becoming the substance that made modern states work. Armies depended on it for transport, and civilian economies depended on it for production. The Soviet Union became self-sufficient in 1954, so it was not competing with the West for access to foreign oil for its own sake. But the post-Stalin Moscow leaders knew how dependent US allies were on oil imports for their economic development. In western Europe dependence on oil for energy consumption increased from less than 10 percent in 1945 to over a third in 1960. In Japan the figures were even more striking: from 6 percent to 40. Eight-five percent of western Europe’s imports came from the Middle East already by 1950. For the United States, which up to 1970 relied primarily on its own production for domestic use, controlling access to Middle Eastern oil was therefore still of major strategic importance.
  • Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (2017)

See also

• Climate change denial
• Fossil fuel
• Global warming
• Petroleum engineering
• Pollution
• Saudi Arabia