Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

RICHES FROM THE EARTH-IV

BANBOO OIL DRILLS

Crude oil was being drilled for in ancient China. The Chinese philosopher Confucius recorded in the 6th century BC that his countrymen drove hollow bamboo rods into the ground in search of brine to provide salt for cattle. In the process, they also came across natural gas and flammable petroleum, which they used themselves or sold for fuel.

SEND FOR ?RED? ADAIR

The American troubleshooter Paul Neal (?RED?) Adair was called in to combat the world?s biggest gas fire, which raged at Gassi Touil in the Algerian Sahara from November 1961 to April 1962. The column of flame reached 137m and the smoke rose to 182m. Adair- from Houston, Texas- used about 250kg of dynamite to extinguish the blaze. His reported fee for the job was $ 1 million.

THE FIRST GUSHER

The first oil well in modern times was drilled to 21m by Colonel E. L. Drake near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in August 1859. It sparked off an oil rush similar to the California gold rush a decade earlier. Crowds of adventurers began boring and cities rose like mushrooms. Immense fortunes were made by those who struck oil, while others lost their chance of riches when their wells ran dry as suddenly as they had began to flow.
The oil was mostly used for lighting, and by the 1880s was also being distilled to make paraffin.

OIL FROM THE OCEAN

The amount of steel used in production platforms in the giant North Sea oil fields would construct more than 170 Eiffel Towers. The first North Sea oil was discovered in 1966 in Danish waters, but the find was too small to be of commercial value.
In September 1969 the oil company Amoco discovered the first oil field to be found in British waters: Montrose, which now produces 14-15,000 barrels of oil a day. The North Sea fields, which lie in British and Norwegian waters, now produce a total of about 145 million tones of crude oil a year- about 3.2 million barrels of oil every day.

ISLAND IN THE STORM

Since the discovery of North Sea oil in the late 1960s, drilling rigs have sprouted like a chain of concrete and metal islands from the storm-tossed waters between Britain and Norway. The largest rig is the jointly owned Statfjord B, about halfway between the two countries, which weighs 816,000 tonnes. Built at a cost of about 1100 million pounds, it is the largest structure ever moved by man, and the storage tanks in its base can hold 1.9 million barrels of crude oil.
The rig was towed into position by a flotilla of powerful tugs, and then its legs were flooded to set it on the seabed some 150m below the waves. The rig, which went into production in November 1982, is so massive that to bring it to a halt from its towing speed of about 2 knots took more than 30km.

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