What is oil? How is it made? What can oil make and how? Why is oil so important? How do we find oil? What is oil used for?

Is it ever dangerous?

If, where the oil is kept in the oil rig breaks, oil spurts out into the ocean. The result of this can cause death to thousand of sea life creatures. Some creatures may even survive after engulfing the oil but then, other creatures may consume this creature (bird and fish) and the bigger creature has that oil inside its body. Eventually, that oil starts to grow and eventually, a different creature can eat that creature and the amount of oil continues to grow again until, a human eats that creature, meaning the creatures badly toxic and this can cause severe food poisoning or even death to the consumer.

What's it used for?

Today, oil plays an important role in the world's market. It can be sold for millions of dollars. Sometimes though, the sales of oil can be very risky due to that it's produced in certain countries such as South America and Iraq. At the moment, we are buying oil from Iraq and at the sane time, Tony Blair and George Bush wish to start a war with them. This can cause great price rises in the cost of their oil or Iraq can even ban the exports. Oil is also used as a fossil fuel due to that we burn this compound to produce chemical energy. E.g. it's used as petrol in cars. Cars burn the oil to be able to move. If you start to read the next few sections below, you will also find that oil can be used to make plastics.

What products can it make and how?

Oil is commonly known for producing plastics. Other products it makes are:

* Bitumen- A thick black liquid used in paving roads.

* Heavy fuels- Used by aeroplanes and ships.

* Lubricating oils- used as fuel for cars and vans.

* Kerosene- Used as fuel for aeroplanes and ships.

* Petroleum gases- e.g. butane and propane.

* Petrol.

With hydrocarbons, you can decrease the amounts. To do this, you need to make the hydrocarbons go through a process which, is called cracking. In this process, you need to provide the hydrocarbons with enough energy to split apart (you provide them with) contains a certain number of hydrocarbons from its original substance.

Having fewer hydrocarbons has a greater advantage than substance with more due to that they burn at lower temperature. E.g. If you have a oven and you put in on to a different temperature like 180 degrees centigrade, you'd need a suitable gas for this. Probably you'd want to have butane due to that it burns around that temperature.

In big business that produce gigantic quantities of oil related products use catalysts to quickly destroy hydrocarbons. These are big machines that burn the hydrocarbons at certain temperatures (depending on the final product wanted). In the process, you need to add porous rocks to fasten up the process. It's very dangerous due to that the gases that are produced are ignitable and must be specially treated at the time.

Plastics are always an easy product to produce. All it takes is a few ingredients and a certain temperature. What happens in scientific terms is that a single hydrocarbon i.e. a monomer wants to make a bigger molecule of it, so it gets rid of one of the hydrogen atoms on its side. The result of this make the carbon atom in the middle connects to another carbon atom. The bonds from the hydrogen atom stay, meaning that the bonds connecting the carbon atoms are as twice as strong. The new molecule is called a polymer and the process it went through is called polymerisation.

Diagram of process

For this process, we can always use different types of product that contain different numbers of hydrocarbons like ethene or pentane. If you add other elements to the process, different plastics can be produced such as polipropaline and policarbonate.

What is it needed for?

With different types of plastics, there are sure to be different types of properties in each one of them and when I say the property of the plastic, I can mean quite a few things. Weight, Appearance, elasticness, melting/boiling points but the most importance of all is its strength and resistance towards things as bacteria. Plastics with closely packed atoms/good strength can be used to invent products that can sustain a food product and keep it around a certain temperature like 0 to 5 degrees centigrade for days or even months. You can have strong plastics to sustain drinks in carbonated drinks or to cover delicate objects such as the hard drive and wires for your computer. Plastics used to make plates and cutly due to that firstly, it's durable and secondly, bacteria can hardly affect it (as long as you wash it up properly. Old black records that used to play music were made of plastic. Many other things are used by plastics.

What if the world never had plastic

Without plastic, metal would be used and though durable and strong, it's reacts with water and oxygen meaning it's unsafe to use outdoors (unless coated with layers of paint). No more fridges due to that fridges are made of plastic and plastic reflects the coldnessback onto the food. If there was no plastic, people won't be able to store meat, meaning that meat has to be cooked fresh and ithis would cause a continuous demand for more meat, and this, can cause to more slaughtering of animals.

Nearly everywhere you go, you can see plastic is used for something thatis important like rubbish bins. If we were to use more metal instead of plastic though, it would be cheaper but less useful.

Conclusion

Overall, oil is a great and fantastic product. Without it, we would suffer with diseases due to rotting foods and we could all die. If it weren't for the creation of plastics and gases, we would never be here as central heating keeps us warm and frozen food keeps bacterial away. Oil though, will one day run out if we keep taking it from the ocean and then we could die but, thankfully the oil companies are slowing down the amount of oil.

By Gary Kimmelman 10.6