Petroleum is an oily, thick, flammable, usually dark coloured liquid that is a form of bitumen or a mixture of various hydrocarbons, occurring naturally in various parts of the world and often separated by distillation into petrol, naphtha, benzene, kerosene and paraffin.
Petroleum was known to the Indians of Western New York, and it was collected in small quantities by them and by the early settlers of New York and Pennsylvania, amounting sometimes to as much as twenty barrels in a year. The first organized and successful effort to bore for petroleum was made in 1854 by a New York company along Oil Creek, New York. Oil was struck at seventy-one feet, and as much as a thousand barrels per day was obtained. Oil fields were quickly located elsewhere in New York and in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, those of Pennsylvania proving the richest. The latter yielded 3,000,000 barrels in 1862. Gasolene, naphtha, kerosene, paraffine and other products soon began to be manufactured in the USA from the petroleum. Research Petroleum
Abbreviations
SciTech
Research Petroleum