Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

322 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. others for delivering it to the central storage tanks or to the refineries, or even for forcing it to the seaboard through long pipe lines, sometimes many hundreds of miles in extent, under a pressure of several hundred pounds to the square inch. The laying of these pipe lines where difficult country and swamps have to be crossed forms in itself a notable branch of engineering. The same is the case with the building of tank ships, capable of carry- ing as much as 10,000 tons of petroleum for thousands of miles without appreciable loss. For the distillation and refining of petroleum many remarkable plants, in whose design chemists and. engineers have played equally important parts, are found on the large oil fields. Finally, the production of shale oil, a not- able industry in Scotland, entails mining on a scale comparable with, that of coal, and the employment of the most up-to-date mining machinery as well as distillation and refining plant. Turning for a moment from the mechanical to the financial aspect of the subject, we may remark Huge Capital invested. that the petroleum industry represents the investment of a colossal capital. The Stan- dard Oil Company alone, one of the largest business cor- porations in the world, is capitalized at some £200,000,000 sterling. It is quite impossible to estimate the enormous sums sunk by private operators and independent companies in the oil fields of the United States. They are such as to overshadow completely the £30,000,000 invested in the Russian oil fields, and the probably equal amount of wealth used to work the deposits of Roumania and Galicia. We must add, to get a grand total, all the money expended in Mexico, Burma, East Indies, Canada, and a dozen other countries of the world. An additional romance is conferred on the subject of this article by the suddenness with which the tapping of a deposit has raised a man from poverty to affluence. To “ strike oil ” is now synonymous with the rapid acquisition of wealth. Out of a thousand instances we may take one or two. In Baku a Tartar peasant, who held a small plot of land in the Romany district, leased it to a producing company which, in the first year, paid him £50,000 as his royalty share in the great “ gusher ” which, they struck. Again, the first well sunk in that district was about to be abandoned by a struggling prospector, when a financier came to his aid in return for a large proportion of the profits. After boring a few feet further oil was struck, and thousands of tons were yielded daily for several months. In another instance an Eng- lish company bought for £500,000 a small plot of land in Bibi-Eibat, on which, a few days after the signing of the transfer, a well began to flow, and in the first month almost recouped the purchasers for their outlay. The story of the oil fields, in America and Russia alike, is replete with instances of a similar kind ; though, as at the gold diggings, success has by no means been the rule. Petroleum is not the rare fluid which it was supposed to be in the ’fifties, when the first oil wells were drilled in America, but is a natural product distrib- uted almost as widely as Origin and . tx t Xi- n Distribution coal. It lies secreted in the , „ , , of Petroleum. interstices of porous strata, such as sands, sandstones, and limestone, and is preferably overlaid by some impervious stratum, such as clay or compact shales. The geological conditions which favour the production and concentration of petroleum in certain localities are now fairly well under- stood, though its actual origin still remains a matter of speculation. It appears prob- able that the oil originated from animal or vegetable matter deposited with a mineral