Since the word petroleum is used to refer to a lot of things, especially related to fuel, let’s understand what the word means.
The word ‘petroleum’ is a combination of two Latin words- Petra (rock) and Oleum (oil). This signifies that petroleum is a kind of oil that is available from rocks or comes through the rocks of the earth. In ancient days, people would use a dense, dark, and slippery fluid that would leak from some rocks in different parts of the world. They would use it for various purposes such as medicine, lighting and making different crude products.
In today’s world, petroleum is a word used to describe crude oil and various other products that’re derived from it. These include various kinds of fuels, fertilizers, medicinal products, combustibles for weapons and lots more.
Petroleum is described technically as a fossil fuel. This means, that it’s formed by dead remains of plants and animals that existed millions of years ago on this planet and were buried by some natural calamity and vagaries of nature, underground.
Over the years, these mortal remains became high hydrocarbon containing complex compounds such as coal, natural gas and petroleum or crude oil. Hence, it has to be drilled from sources that’re underwater in sea or riverbeds and land.
The basic composition of crude oil is Carbon 84 percent to 87 percent, Hydrogen 11 percent to 14 percent, Sulphur 0.06 percent to two percent, Nitrogen 0.1 percent to two percent, Oxygen 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, metals and assays about 0.14 percent.
Petroleum is also known as crude oil because it has few uses unless it’s refined at refineries. However, once refined, petroleum finds many uses.
As a matter of fact, petroleum or crude oil is also known informally as ‘black gold’ and sometimes as ‘liquid gold’. That’s because prices of crude oil are decided internationally. Crude oil is necessary for lots of things. Surely, you would know some of the uses of petroleum products, that’re derived from crude oil. To find more about that and about various petroleum products we are trading in, just visit the “products” page.
