99 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 was hailed as America's first billionaire in 1916?

John D. Rockefeller was proclaimed a billionaire five years after the Supreme Court dismantled his trust; the breakup had proved immensely profitable for him as the successor companies' value soared.

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, coined in Medieval Latin, literally means what?

Rock oil is the literal sense: Latin petra means rock and oleum means oil. The company behind Edwin Drake's 1859 well was first called 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 lines; on 26 September 2022 underwater explosions left three of their four pipes inoperable.

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?

Alberta's Athabasca sands hold bitumen too thick to flow like ordinary crude, so shallow deposits are strip-mined and deeper ones are loosened with injected steam.

Which G7 country became the first to end coal-fired electricity when its last coal plant closed in 2024?

Britain shut Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire on 30 September 2024, ending 142 years of coal-fired electricity in the country that pioneered it.

Kerosene displaced which 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 nickname do drillers give the stack of valves and fittings fixed atop a completed well?

Christmas tree is the trade name for the valves, spools and fittings that control flow from a finished well; such devices became commonplace after one tamed the runaway Spindletop gusher in 1901.

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 called 'sour' rather than 'sweet' when it is rich in which element?

Sulfur makes a crude sour, while low-sulfur oil is sweet; the label is said to come from early prospectors who tasted and smelled samples to judge their quality.

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 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, where it boiled brine dry. The salt, not the gas, was the prize.

Which country pumped more crude oil in 2023 than any nation had in any earlier year?

The United States averaged a record 12.9 million barrels a day in 2023, more than any nation in history, as the shale boom reversed what had looked like a permanent decline since 1970.

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.

Which country's retreating army set fire to about 700 Kuwaiti oil wells in 1991?

Iraq's forces torched the wells as a US-led coalition drove them out of Kuwait; the first fires were put out in April 1991, and the last well was not capped until 6 November.

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.

Which 1890 law did the Supreme Court use to break up Standard Oil?

The Sherman Antitrust Act was the weapon: in 1911 the court found Standard Oil an illegal monopoly and split it into dozens of companies, the ancestors of ExxonMobil and Chevron.

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.

Which two 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, was refused a seat among the majors, so he dubbed them the 'Seven Sisters' and offered oil states a 75-25 profit split in place of the usual 50-50.

Which technique, later the key to shale, was first tried in Kansas in 1947?

Hydraulic fracturing was first tried by Stanolind on a well in the Hugoton gas field; the firm patented the process and licensed it to Halliburton, which ran the first commercial jobs in 1949.

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.

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

Louisiana's Lake Charles was the loading point for the converted cargo ship; its safe crossing proved the idea workable, and from 1964 regular LNG cargoes sailed from Algeria to Canvey Island.

Brent crude, a global oil price benchmark, 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 grew into a pipeline and storage hub after an oil boom on its doorstep in the 1910s, and now styles itself the 'Pipeline Crossroads of the World'.

Whose company opened the world's first coal-fired public power station, in London in 1882?

Thomas Edison lit London first: his Holborn Viaduct plant began running in January 1882, eight months before his Pearl Street station opened in New York.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline carries crude 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay to which ice-free port?

Valdez received its first barrel on 28 July 1977; twelve years later the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground nearby and fouled Prince William Sound.

Which Powder River Basin state, home to America's two biggest coal mines, dug 41% of US coal in 2022?

Wyoming out-dug second-placed West Virginia three to one; Black Thunder and North Antelope Rochelle alone supplied about a fifth of the nation's coal that year.

Which Middle Eastern city hosted the 2023 COP28 summit, where nations first agreed to transition away from fossil fuels?

Dubai's summit was chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who also ran Abu Dhabi's state oil company, yet nearly 200 countries there recognised for the first time the need to move away from oil, gas and coal.

Which country, the world's top lignite producer in 2014, has demolished villages to extend its brown-coal pits?

Germany dug 178 million tonnes of lignite in 2014; Lützerath, beside the Garzweiler pit, was cleared and demolished in January 2023 after courts backed the mine's expansion.

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

South Africa has plentiful coal but relied on imported oil, so the state set Sasol up to make liquid fuel at home by the Fischer–Tropsch process.

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 toxic metal, added to petrol from the 1920s to stop engine knock, was finally dropped from road fuel in 2021?

Lead, as tetraethyl lead, was found to stop knock by General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley, who went on to develop the first CFCs; both inventions were later banned from common use.

The Bóbrka oil field, where a pharmacist opened one of the world's first oil wells in 1854, lies in which country?

Poland's Bóbrka field near Krosno was still producing in 2020; Ignacy Łukasiewicz, the pharmacist behind it, had distilled kerosene from crude oil in 1853 and built a lamp that lit a hospital operation in Lwów.

Which city's oil fields produced more than half the world's crude by 1901?

Baku, on the Caspian, out-produced the whole of America between 1898 and 1901; the Nobel brothers built refineries, a pipeline and the first oil tanker there.

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: rising heat and pressure concentrate the carbon, so each rank yields more heat than the one below.

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

Mississippian rocks are the lower, limestone-rich sequence, named for outcrops along the upper Mississippi valley; the Pennsylvanian above them is named for Pennsylvania's widespread coal beds of that age.

What is the organic matter in source rocks called that breaks down into oil and gas when buried and heated?

Kerogen is a waxy, insoluble solid that breaks down into petroleum-like liquids and gases when heated under pressure, which is why oil shale, rich in it, can be cooked into fuel.

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

The International Energy Agency was set up after the 1973 oil crisis; each member must hold emergency oil stocks worth at least 90 days of net imports, ready for a coordinated release.

Coal miners once carried which caged bird underground to give early warning of poisonous gas?

The canary idea came from physiologist John Scott Haldane in 1895, and the birds were at work within a year. A bird in distress meant the air was turning deadly.

Which lighter-than-air gas, prized for cooling MRI magnets, is extracted commercially from natural gas fields?

Helium forms deep underground from radioactive decay and collects in the same rock traps as natural gas. Some fields hold as much as 7% of it.

Which skin-care brand began with a waxy residue that workers had to clean off oil rig pumps in 1859?

Vaseline was the name chemist Robert Chesebrough gave the petroleum jelly he extracted from the drillers' 'rod wax' back in Brooklyn. He patented it in 1872.

The La Brea Tar Pits, where seeping crude has trapped animals for tens of thousands of years, lie in which city?

Los Angeles has grown up around the pits, which now sit in a city park. Finds include saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and a nearly intact mammoth nicknamed Zed.

Which state's town of Centralia has emptied because a coal mine fire has burned beneath it since 1962?

Centralia, Pennsylvania, had 1,000 residents in 1980 and five in 2020. One account traces the blaze to a 1962 clean-up of the town landfill, which sat in an old strip-mine pit.

The Darvaza gas crater, a fiery pit nicknamed the Door to Hell, has burned for decades in which country?

Turkmenistan is home to the crater, a collapsed natural gas field up to 70 metres across. One account says Soviet engineers lit it in 1971 to burn off poisonous gas and underestimated how much there was.

Which 2007 film won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar for playing Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned ruthless oilman?

There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Oil!, a 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair. Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed it, and it earned eight Oscar nominations.

Which oil giant grew out of a London antique dealer's business that began importing curios for collectors in 1833?

Shell honours the seashells that Marcus Samuel's father sold to London collectors. His sons founded the 'Shell' Transport and Trading Company in 1897.

A proverb for pointless effort speaks of carrying coals to which English city, once a great coal port?

Newcastle upon Tyne shipped so much coal from nearby mines that taking more there made no sense. The saying had crossed the Atlantic by 1679.

Which future prime minister, as First Lord of the Admiralty, moved the Royal Navy's ships from coal to oil?

Winston Churchill then persuaded Parliament in 1914 to buy into the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, so the fleet would never run short of fuel.

Which gas, the main driver of global warming, is released whenever coal, oil or natural gas is burned?

Carbon dioxide from these fuels comes from material that had been locked underground for millions of years. About half of what is released stays in the atmosphere.

Which metal, mined like coal but split rather than burned, fuels the world's nuclear power stations?

Uranium is the only natural element with a readily split form, uranium-235, in more than trace amounts. Splitting its atoms gives the heat that a coal plant gets from a fire.

The energy in coal was first captured from sunlight by ancient plants through which process?

Photosynthesis stored the Sun's energy in plant tissue, and burial and heat only concentrated it. Burning coal releases sunlight that fell millions of years ago.

Most coal began as dead plants that piled up, without fully rotting, in which kind of landscape?

Swamps kept fallen plants under mud and acidic water, away from the oxygen that would have rotted them. Such coal forests covered much of the tropics in the Carboniferous.

Coal itself counts as which type of rock, the type that also holds most oil and gas?

Sedimentary rock builds up from material settling over time. Coal forms when buried vegetation is squeezed and chemically changed by the sediments piling up above it.

Most of which everyday material, pioneered by Bakelite in 1907, is made from chemicals derived from oil and gas?

Plastic in its modern, synthetic sense is a word Leo Baekeland, the inventor of Bakelite, was using by 1909. Most kinds start as petrochemicals, though some newer ones are made from plant starch and cellulose.

In a coal-fired power station, steam from the boiler spins which machine to drive the generator?

The turbine in its modern form was invented by Charles Parsons in 1884. His first model drove a dynamo that made just 7.5 kilowatts.

Which form of air pollution, fed by coal fires, killed thousands of Londoners in five days of December 1952?

Smog settled over the city when cold, windless weather trapped the smoke of countless coal fires. The disaster led to the Clean Air Act 1956.

Which bottled gas, a by-product of oil refining and natural gas processing, is a popular fuel for barbecue grills?

Propane boils at −42 °C, so the liquid in the bottle turns to gas as soon as it is released.

Which Scottish engineer, whose name is now a unit of power, made steam engines far more efficient?

James Watt added a separate condenser to the wasteful Newcomen engine. He also developed the idea of horsepower.

Which spongy fuel, cut from bogs and dried for hearth fires in Ireland, is the first stage in forming coal?

Peat that stays buried long enough turns into lignite, the lowest grade of coal. It was traditionally cut by hand and left to dry in the sun.

Which hardest, highest-ranked grade of coal was prized by Civil War blockade runners for its smokeless flame?

Anthracite let Confederate blockade runners fire their boilers without a plume of smoke to give them away. It has the fewest impurities and packs the most energy of any coal.

Oil and natural gas are mixtures of which compounds, named after the only two elements they contain?

Hydrocarbons come no simpler than methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. In the industry the word is also shorthand for the fuels themselves.

Which hard grey fuel, made by baking coal without air, did Abraham Darby use to smelt iron in 1709?

Coke freed ironmakers from their dependence on scarce charcoal, and it is the fuel that feeds blast furnaces to this day.

Which refinery process separates crude oil into petrol, diesel and other products by their different boiling points?

Fractional distillation is the most common way of separating things at a refinery. The products with the highest boiling points are also the darkest and thickest.

Which rating, posted on every petrol pump, measures how well a fuel resists knocking in an engine?

Octane numbers compare a fuel with a test blend of iso-octane and heptane that knocks just as readily. A fuel rated too low for an engine can make it knock or fire early.

What do miners call a bed of coal, the layer that a longwall machine's spinning drums cut along?

A seam within about 200 feet of the surface is usually dug from an open pit, while deeper ones are mined underground.

Which disease, known to doctors as coal workers' pneumoconiosis, comes from years of breathing in mine dust?

Black lung develops as dust the body cannot clear builds up, inflaming and scarring the tissue. Most inhaled dust is swept out by mucus and coughing.

Mountaintop removal mining blasts away summits to reach the coal beneath in which American mountain range?

The Appalachians lose their peaks mostly in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, the region's top two coal-producing states.

Which sticky residue left over from refining crude oil goes mostly into surfacing roads?

Asphalt is what remains of the crude once the lighter products have been distilled off. About 70% of each year's output goes into road building.

Which prime minister defeated the year-long miners' strike led by Arthur Scargill in 1984–85?

Margaret Thatcher held out against a walkout by two-thirds of the country's miners. Arthur Scargill had refused to put the strike to a national ballot, having lost three earlier votes.

Which president put solar water heating panels on the White House and created the Department of Energy?

Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Energy into being on 4 August 1977, the first new cabinet post in eleven years.

Which TV soap followed the feuding Ewing family, owners of an oil company and Southfork Ranch?

Dallas ran for 14 seasons on CBS, with Larry Hagman as the greedy, scheming oil tycoon J. R. Ewing, who became its breakout character.

Which country singer's 1970 chart-topper and 1980 biopic recall her childhood as a coal miner's daughter in Kentucky?

Loretta Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and the song led to a bestselling autobiography and then the film, in which Sissy Spacek played her.

A gas flame burning with plenty of air, as on a well-adjusted stove or Bunsen burner, is which colour?

Blue shows that the gas is burning completely. A yellow flame gets its colour from tiny glowing particles of soot, a sign that the fuel is short of air.

Which planned pipeline from Canada to Nebraska had its permit revoked on Joe Biden's first day as president?

Keystone XL would have linked the two ends of an existing line by a shorter route and a larger pipe. Biden revoked its permit by executive order on 20 January 2021.

Which 1997 climate treaty, in force from 2005, committed industrial nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions?

The Kyoto Protocol set targets for 2008 to 2012, and all 36 countries that took full part in that first period met them.

Which Latin American country reports the world's largest proven oil reserves, much of it in the Orinoco Belt?

Venezuela pumps crude so heavy by world standards that much of it has to go through specialised refineries. Some experts think its reserve figures are inflated.

Which small Arabian emirate shares the world's largest natural gas field, which lies under the sea off its coast?

Qatar began pumping gas from the field in 1989, eighteen years after it was discovered.

The Middle East's first commercial oil discovery came in 1908 at Masjed Soleyman in which country?

Iran was then known abroad as Persia, and the find gave rise to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, one of the forerunners of BP.

Charles Keeling's record of the changing atmosphere has been kept since 1958 on a volcano in which American state?

Hawaii was chosen because Mauna Loa stands far from any continent and has almost no vegetation to disturb the readings.

Natural gas supplies the hydrogen for making which chemical, the starting point for most nitrogen fertilisers?

Ammonia made by the Haber process takes 3% to 5% of the world's natural gas. The recipe needs only three ingredients: water, gas and nitrogen from the air.

In 1966 a colliery waste tip slid onto a junior school in which Welsh village, killing 116 children?

Aberfan lay below a tip that had been piled on top of a natural spring, against the Coal Board's own rules. The inquiry blamed the Board and nine of its staff.

Which chemist invented the gauze-screened safety lamp of 1815 that let coal miners work amid explosive gas?

Humphry Davy wrapped the flame in fine metal gauze. Air could reach it through the mesh, but the holes were too small for the flame to pass out and ignite the gas beyond.

Which Swedish chemist calculated in 1896 that burning fossil fuels could warm the whole planet?

Svante Arrhenius was trying to explain the ice ages when he made the calculation. He concluded that the emissions from human fuel burning were large enough to matter.

Which colour was the synthetic dye that 18-year-old William Perkin made by accident from a coal tar chemical in 1856?

Mauve came out of a failed attempt to make quinine, the malaria drug. Coal tar, which supplied his raw material, was an abundant by-product of making gas for lighting.

What do geologists call an arch-shaped upward fold of rock layers, the classic trap where oil and gas collect?

An anticline catches buoyant oil as it rises, holding it under a sealing layer at the crest. About 80 percent of the world's petroleum has been found in such traps.

Canada's Oil Springs, where a well dug in 1858 set off the continent's first oil rush, is in which province?

Ontario's James Miller Williams, already making asphalt there, is said to have been digging for water when he struck free oil. His well came a year before the famous one at Titusville.

What is the oil industry's term for burning off unwanted natural gas at a well instead of piping it away?

Flaring of the unwanted gas that comes up with the crude can go on throughout the life of an oil well.

Whose three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen of 1885 is considered the first practical car driven by a petrol engine?

Carl Benz patented the motorcar in 1886, the year he first drove it in public. His Mannheim works became the world's first car factory.