A Barrel of Oil

Oil. Carbon footprint. Emissions. Pollution. Climate Change. All of these without doubt today, and for quite sometime now, make up the collective global Bogeyman. If they are the composite multiple personalities of a much maligned entity, it is aptly symbolized, by acclimation among many, as "a barrel of oil". A barrel of oil, for the sake of addressing the devil that it is perceived to be, owns that personality -  in a manner of speaking, that is.  We begin to look.

There is only one place to start. The universe. Afterall, we all belong to it and we can't think of any place from which to begin. We, all living things and every conceivable inanimate object we can think of, from the smallest invisible elements to the largest structures lurking beyond the night sky, belong to that universe.  But none of any of them can lay claim to dominance though we may find a common denominator, if we try, and should ask this, "What are the  most abundant stuff in the universe?".  Imagine as far as your mind can reach as you look up at the night sky.  Unaided, your eyes see twinkling lights of stars.  Some are smudges of light.  They could be galaxies. Galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.  There are trillions upon trillions of these tiny lights. What are they made of?  A legitimate question indeed, because surely they are made predominantly of something.

Imagine, gathering them all together in a ball. Let's say, we color code the elements that make up the ball.  What would it look like? It will practically be one color.  One dominant color and the other just a shade of it.  If we use red for the dominant material, the ball will be all red, with tiny blotches of pinkish red.

The red is hydrogen and the sprinkling of pink would be helium.  The two of them will make up about 98% of the total stuff and everything else - from lithium to iron to gold - make up the rest. But we'd like to know at least what comes in third and fourth. What we find is actually quite a significant revelation.

Oxygen and Carbon are next, trailed by nitrogen followed by a host of many others.  But as a living organism, a thinking one at that, we may ask also, "Why does the universe need the rest of the insignificant many others?"  Surely, the universe does not need any of the rest if it has 98% of two elements already.  Actually, the universe would have been content with just one; if the universe knows what or how to be content with anything.  Well, it had no choice.  

The laws of physics, or the Laws of God, has a say on everything. If the universe is a stage play, the four main characters are Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen and Carbon; the rest are bit players and stage hands, but as in any theater production they all have roles to play.  The script, the dialogue, the plot and cadence of the story  were all written by the universal screen writer - God.

So, how did all of these come about?  It all begun as pure energy in a flash - the beginning of creation.  Following the script, energy soon begun condensing into something tangible.  Funny names like the six flavors of quarks, then electrons and protons, emerged from the universal soup that took hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years to cook.  Hydrogen with its single proton and one electron was the building block but it was more than that.  Locked inside each hydrogen atom is a miniscule amount of condensed energy.  The script called for gravity to eventually take over, compressing and organizing what used to be every hydrogen bouncing and avoiding every other hydrogen all over the universe. But after awhile, due to the immense attraction of gravity as clumps of hydrogen gas are drawn ever larger to form into gigantic clouds that by now are self-compacting into tight immensely massive balls with intense pressure and heat, two hydrogen atoms would  be forced to fuse to become helium, lithium would result out of further compression.  As pressures build up some more, oxygen and carbon followed.  All of these new species have in them the energy from the moment of creation.  For what seemed like eternity those are all that were around for many millions of years.

13.7 billions years later, here we are! Each time hydrogen fused under unbelievable pressure energy is released.  That is what powers the stars.  Some of those balls of hydrogen became massive stars, attracting and organizing themselves into a swirling cluster of countless other stars circling around a common center to become galaxies.  In one of those galaxies was a medium-size but stable star that became our sun.  4.5 billion years in the making is our solar system.  In it is a small rocky planet - Earth.

In that little planet came some of the smartest creatures. Creatures that think and argue.  Most recently, came a debate that was hardly noticed but by a handful of people.  In that debate came all kinds of dissertations and assumptions and arguments.  Someone, or a group of individuals with plenty of time on their hands, went to calculate that a barrel of oil is equivalent to 22,300 human labor-hours.  Converted monetarily, from the labor hours it represented, that barrel of oil is worth $164,000.

We will not get into how they came up with that because some were either too intractably complicated to wrap our minds around or too simplistic as to be absurd.  Some ignored, others took into account friction, heat loss and other kinds of suppositions and assumptions.  Alternatively, someone just simply imagined that in the absence of a fuel, he had imagined ten people pushing a car, loaded with passengers.  To get to a distance, undefined but quite enough to get the passengers from point A to point B, he estimated that over 20,000 man hours were needed to get an equivalent number of miles from so many gallons of fuel derived from a barrel of oil, had that fuel been used to power the car.  Like I said, it was simple though likely inaccurate.

However, it is true that way back in ancient history when slaves carried Cleopatra or other historical royal luminaries in a transport of some kind - called, what else, a king carrier - on their shoulders, there had to be some kind of human labor-hours expended to move them from place to place. Calculating forward and comparably against today's performance of a Rolls Royce or Mercedes Maybach on several gallons of fuel, many thousand man-hours would be needed to do the same task that these cars will do for today's luminaries and celebrities; but the king carrier of ancient times, though it stood for pomp and circumstance, would have been much less comfortable and clearly without the soothing air conditioning, HEPA-filtered air, computer-tuned suspension and a sixteen-speaker-surround sound system.

I can't help but give thought to the four main characters in the universal stage play. Once these characters came on stage the flirtation between hydrogen and carbon was unstoppable.  Actually, every hydrogen can't help itself but to immediately cling and hold fast to every carbon it meets.  Four of them in fact would readily embrace one carbon atom.  Which is fine because there are far more hydrogen than carbon. Soon several such embraces would occur in all kinds of combinations.  These union between them would be classified  inevitably as families known as hydrocarbons.  Another group of them combined a little differently.  They will be called carbohydrates.  Both very critical to our existence. But one thing remains. Their retained energy as individuals would now be their combined latent energy. Hydrogen and carbon in permanent embrace can, however, be broken up, explosively but controllably if handled properly.  Further on that later.

As marriages go, the closest to a monogamous relationship among these universal characters would still be a harem of sort - one carbon holding on to four hydrogen.  That was in the original script because carbon by nature has four outer electrons that need to bond to be stable.  So, one carbon and four hydrogen symbolically become CH4.  It is called methane. Again, these unions would become complex, even more so, and by the time more carbons and hydrogen linking together in their own agreed-upon communities of ever complex organizations, we get propane, butane, gasoline, diesel fuel, etc. - all to be managed away on their own separate paths. What is left is the so called bottom of the original barrel of crude oil. The remaining gooey, black substance would be pitch or asphalt or bitumen in the King's English.

Just as a side note, speaking of King's English, here is a quote from the (KJV) Old Testament depicting the instruction for Noah's Ark.

Genesis 6: 14-15, So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it..." Pitch used by Noah to waterproof the ark is widely interpreted to be what was then a naturally occurring substance off the ground, which would have been common in the Middle East at that time (or even now). Even if we look to the Noah story as allegorical, the mention of pitch by the Biblical author was based on factual material. A few thousand years later in what was then called the New World, Native Americans were known to waterproof their canoes with the same material - pitch - which they would scoop from the ground and applied to the bottom and seams of their canoes.

Pitch today from the refining process of crude oil is still gooey, sticky and still black, but combined with aggregate of stone and sand, laid over ribbons of compacted ground is what we would call an asphalt road. There are thousands upon thousands of miles of these roads around the world. Asphalt literally paves much of the entire globe. Asphalt roofing material cover over 90% of homes in the U.S. Basements and below ground sections of any building are water proofed with asphalt-based material.

Asphalt is merely part of a barrel of oil. Unlike cement that has to be quarried, transported and processed, asphalt is the bottom component of a multiple personality that is a barrel of oil. By the way, cement production is not only solely made possible by oil fired processes, it is also a high energy consumer (from transporting quarried material to shipping finished bags of cement). Impossible to accomplish with electric vehicles or furnaces.

Not to be outdone, oxygen also has a special affinity to carbon. Millions of years ago, much of the early life forms were from the assimilation of carbon and oxygen and out of that came microscopic plants - phytoplanktons - that permeated the ancient seas. Again, the script called for other life forms to develop - also as microscopic animals - called zooplanktons that subsisted on the plant planktons. Carbon, as in almost all life forms we know today, is the scaffolding, the railway if you will, for how living things get put together and how they spread out to cover much of the earth, on the ground, up in the air and deep underground. Phytoplanktons and complex plants still get their energy from sunlight - that ball of hydrogen, remember? But more importantly, zooplanktons that feed on plant planktons, are then dined on by small fishes that get eaten by big fishes and so on and on the proverbial food chain.

Millions of years later carbon and hydrogen from dead plants got buried deep as piles and piles of them layered over and over. Compacted over time by heat and pressure their bonds were sealed for eternity. Or so, we'd think. But not for long, because a new scene, new act on stage takes over . Again, as in today's common refrain of "there is an app for that", there was a written script for what followed. Hydrogen and carbon, any hydrocarbon bond, in the presence of oxygen and source of heat or ignition gets broken up. In so doing they release the energy they've been keeping for so long. In the break up carbon abandons the hydrogen and embraces a new partner that was the cause of the breakup. It picks up two of the oxygen to become a threesome called carbon dioxide. If only one oxygen eloped with the carbon, it is a much worse renegade - it is the ever more villainous carbon monoxide. But in the universal script written from the beginning of time, plants would readily want carbon dioxide to grow and flourish. It will take carbon for itself, spit out oxygen for all air breathing life forms to use. The real existential threat is for carbon dioxide to go away and for us to run out of oxygen. It is on the script all along.

Is a barrel of oil really the devil? If in a flash of super power you are able to wish every barrel of oil away right this moment, you will be sitting on bare soil, without shelter, no heat and no refrigerator to keep your food fresh. Oh, wait a minute. There is no grocery store. If you're lucky you will have a horse. And remember you will need 300 of them that your SUV used to give you on a gallon of gas.

So, there's the story. The question is, "Are we willing a do over and go back to many thousand man-hours to move from point A to point B"? And leave the families of hydrogen and carbon alone? What of the tools and machines that need to be oiled, or fueled to get us going? There are now not enough whales in the seas, whose blubbery fat we used to boil, to provide us with what used to be the only source of oil to light up our lamps and make the simple machines run smoothly. Whales have oil from the ground to be thankful for. Had that first Pennsylvania oil not come out of the ground at the time that it did, whales by now will have been driven to extinction. Forget the industrial revolution, forget the plastic frame that encases your computer, your cell phone and on and on. Forget the world we have today. Forget about reading this on your phone, tablet or desktop.

Think carefully before we condemn a barrel of oil. Think also about why we should rather be spending time and resources to find ways of harnessing the power of a barrel of oil cleanly and safely instead of condemning it as the devil that it is not. It is much of what the universe is made of.

And remember, if you can remember only one thing - you are a carbon based life form. You are a living being dependent on carbohydrates for energy, oxygen to breathe and hydrocarbon to warm your meals, to move you around to places your ancestors could never have done, to crusie on ships or fly on airplanes to go to distant places never before achievable within your alloted vacation time or even for just a weekend. Think hard before you wish away something that also provide a source of livelihood for millions of people around the world.