Oil is a fossil fuel that originated from living matter such as algae and zooplankton, accumulated over millions of years both on and below the Earth’s surface. Under pressure from rocks and sands above it, this mixture turned into hydrocarbons (chemicals made up of carbon and hydrogen) that are solid (coal), liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas or methane).
Products made from oil have been used for thousands of years: bitumen was used to build roads in the Roman empire, for example. Industrial mining of oil began in the mid-nineteenth century in the USA and Azerbaijan (then part of the Russian empire). Oil wells were drilled, and refineries built to separate crude oil into products ranging from ‘light’ (for example, propane and kerosene, now the basis for aircraft fuel), to petrol, to ‘heavy’ fuel oil and asphalt.
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