User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

Brief history

Petroleum was known and utilized in various fashions in ancient China, Persia and Rome. However, the modern history of the petroleum industry began in 1846 when Abraham Gessner of Nova Scotia, Canada discovered how to produce kerosene from coal. Shortly thereafter, in 1854, Ignacy Lukasiewicz began producing kerosene from hand-dug oil wells in the town of Krosno, now in Poland. The first large petroleum refinery was built in Ploesti, Romania in 1856.

In North America, the first oil well was drilled in 1858 by James Miller Williams in Ontario, Canada. In the United States, the petroleum industry began in 1859 when Edwin Drake found oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The industry grew slowly in the 1800s, primarily producing kerosene for oil lamps. In the early 1900's, the introduction of the internal combustion engine and its use in automobiles created a market for gasoline that was the impetus for fairly rapid growth of the petroleum industry. The early finds of petroleum like those in Ontario and Pennsylvania were soon outstripped by large oil "booms" in Oklahoma, Texas and California.

Prior to World War II in the early 1940s, most petroleum refineries in the United States consisted simply of atmospheric crude oil distillation and perhaps some refineries also had vacuum distillation as well as visbreakers. All of the many other refining processes discussed above became commercially available after World War II, and the petroleum industry experienced very rapid growth from then until the present. Petroleum refineries grew much, much larger and the refining technology also experienced rapid growth.