INTRODUCTION

Brent versus the Eiffel Tower

ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH

Left: „Next!“ (1904) Political cartoon by Udo J. Keppler.

An octopus representing Standard Oil with tentacles wrapped around U.S. Congress and steel, copper, and shipping industries, and reaching for the White House

Right: First oil rigs shooting out in Balakhany, at the shore of the Caspian Sea.

Oil production: brief update about it’s past and present

Petroleum production is not a recent discovery - the use of oil has been documented in various ancient writings. Herodotus mentioned that natural asphalt was used in construction in Babylon, the earliest Chinese writings describe oil being used in its raw state before refinement was discovered, while the ancient Japanese called oil ‘’burning water’’. The first streets of Baghdad were paved with tar, derived from petroleum. Marco Polo describes oil production in Baku, where people would use sponges to collect oil spills from salty lakes in buckets. In ancient times, petroleum products were used as building materials (e.g. bitumen, asphalt, tar) as well as for illumination (e.g. kerosene). Native Americans used it as a cure-all.

The industrial revolution and its fuel-fed machines led to a tremendous demand for petroleum, where the rise in demand for oil was particularly high during the second half of the Twentieth Century when the automotive industry boomed. This created strong economic growth in many oil-rich countries, created new dependencies between countries and changed political relations. Today around 90% of all vehicles are either partially or fully powered by oil. Since then, demand for petroleum has continued to grow. Due to the facts however that oil is a non-renewable resource and that oil wells at seashores are currently drying out, drilling processes are now moving towards deeper waters and becoming ever more complex. Fixed platforms, operating in shallow waters, are to decommission due to field exhaustions.1

1 (Lehmköster, 2014) Lehmköster, Jan. 2014. World ocean review: Oil and gas from the sea. 2014. ISBN 978-3-86648-2210.