Historical Dictionary Of The Petroleum Industry

The petroleum industry is unique: it is an industry without which modern civilization would collapse. Despite the advances in alternative energy, petroleum’s role is still central. Petroleum still drives economics, geopolitics, and sometimes war. The history of petroleum is, to some measure, the history of the modern world. This book represents a concise but complete one-volume reference on the history of the petroleum industry from pre-modern times to the present day, covering all aspects of business, technology, and geopolitics. The book also presents an analysis of the future of petroleum, and a highly useful set of statistical graphs. Anyone interested in the history, status, and outlook for petroleum will find this book a uniquely valuable first place to look. This new second edition incorporates all the revolutionary changes in the petroleum landscape since the first edition was published, including the boom in extraction of oil and gas from shale formations using techniques such as fracking and horizontal drilling. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Petroleum Industry contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on companies, people, events, technologies, countries, provinces, cities, and regions related to the history of the world’s petroleum industry. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the petroleum industry.

The world as we have known it for the past century would have been very different without petroleum. Petroleum, particularly in the form of crude oil and its refined products, has been central to all aspects of modern industrial society and has been a major strategic geopolitical objective for nations. The 20th century was the age of oil, and at least part of the 21st century will be as well. Petroleum is used as an energy source and as a raw material for the production of an immense variety of chemicals and synthetic materials. Almost all the world's food relies on petroleum for fertilizer, pesticides, cultivation, or transport. Petroleum has been particularly dominant as a source of transportation fuels, an application for which cost-effective substitutes will be especially difficult to find. The A to Z of the Petroleum Industry presents a concise but complete one-volume reference on the history of the petroleum industry from pre-modern times to the present day. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on companies, people, places, events, technologies, and phenomena related to the history of the world's petroleum industry. Anyone interested in the history, status, and outlook for the petroleum industry will find this book a uniquely valuable source.

Excerpt from The Petroleum Dictionary My Attention was first attracted to the language of the oil field in 1925 when at a Currie, Texas, school a third-grade pupil came to my desk to supply the personal data necessary for public-school records. Among the questions to be answered was "What is your father's occupation?" The answer was delivered with all the pride a nine-year-old could muster: "My father is a roughneck!" I was somewhat taken aback, but more shocks were in store for me. I was destined to teach not only the children of roughnecks, but also those of pumpers, roustabouts, toolies, swivel necks, and derrick monkeys. Childhood in a Methodist parsonage had not prepared me for life among people engaged in such unusual occupations. For a few months I was constantly astonished by the expressions that fell from the lips of near-infants who had never known any life or language but that of the oil field. But gradually I came to accept the language as a legitimate and apt means of expression. Its freshness, its peculiarities, and its vividness fascinate me to this day. It was not until early in 1947 that I considered undertaking a serious study of oil-field language. Thomas Pyles, then a member of the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, suggested to a graduate class in modern English that there was a definite need for technically-trained workers to record the language of various industries, including the petroleum industry. Despite the fact that my sex and my family responsibilities offered grave problems in doing field work, I felt I was peculiarly fitted to prepare a dictionary of oil-field terms. I had been interested (though I must admit unscientifically so) in the language since 1925. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"Based on A Dictionary for the Petroleum Industry, third edition revised."

This dictionary is designed to make the industrial vocabulary of earlier eras understandable and accessible to contemporary investigation. It brings together in one place a great deal of information that has been widely scattered in obscure places. The specialized language of the shop, the mill, and other everyday settings, although initially familiar, becomes quite foreign in the context of general lanuage. Mulligan contends that, upon close examination of this specialized vocabulary, the lives and experiences of the early workers can be better understood, thus opening another avenue in the exploration of this country's industrial heritage. As a historical barometer reflecting the extent of change in an industry, the language of particular crafts and industries brings together the social and cultural background of the participants, and the dynamic of the activity or work.