160 years of jittery oil production and prices
By S.W. and G.D.
A century of jittery oil production and prices
OIL has been around for a long time. Some 6,000 years ago it was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East. The Chinese refined it to use in lamps around 1,000 years ago. But the oil industry only got going in the 1860s after the first wells were sunk in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside. It provided kerosene—a substitute to
whale oil in lamps, the main source of artificial light, as overexploitation had made it scarce and costly. (Some things never change.) The unstable liquids left over from the refining process were thrown away. Yet it is precisely that petrol and diesel that became the most important. Prices were initially just as unstable, until standardised production, innovation and steady output kept prices flat, relatively speaking. Demand soared as post-war affluence saw people take to the roads—interrupted by the oil shocks in the 1970s and 1980s. Prices swooned, dented by recessions and lifted by globalisation. But a combination of increasing fuel efficiency and the substitution of natural gas for transport could mean that, after a century of growing thirst for fuel, a peak in demand is in sight.
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