By Nick Griffiths-Haynes.
In February 1996 the Sea Empress spilled over 70,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea contaminating 100km of the Pembrokeshire coast. The names of other ships such as The Braer, which ran aground in the Shetlands in 1993, The Prestige, which lost 63,000 tonnes off the coast of Spain in 2002 or perhaps most famously, The Exxon Valdez which contaminated Prince William Sound with 37,000 tonnes of crude in 1989, all tell similar stories of the pollution of large areas of our natural environment by oil. Every year there are spills effecting smaller areas. In 2004 for example 15,000 tonnes of crude oil was spilled.
The title of this article suggests a discussion on the after effects of some of these oil spills, how shorelines, sands and soils cope. How long the pollution lasts, what the effects are on the organisms living in the contaminated area and what efforts the people who spilled the oil in the first place made to clean it up. But this is not what this article is about.
Crude oil is only the beginning of a story – a narrative with tendrils that spread out and touch us all. Druids like stories, almost as much as The Environment we care so passionately about, supporting causes great and small, caring for the wild places. From those hidden under a stone in the back garden to ancient woodland threatened by a new road scheme.
When we think of the word Environment it is loaded with meaning. It conjures up images of threatened trees in ancient woodland, rivers teaming with life and agricultural run off, hillsides wild and beautiful, full of perfect building material. We think of protesters shouting slogans, business and government conspiring to best serve themselves and the economy, using The Environment as a PR exercise…
The word Environment is slowly becoming more abstracted from its original meaning by global protests and campaigns trying (quite rightly) to make us see what we are doing to the planet. In the compact Oxford English dictionary the definition is given as “The surroundings in which a person, animal or plant lives or operates.” Put simply this means that wherever you are, you are in your environment. You are in it Now.
For most of us in the western world who have the time and relative comfort to read or write articles like this, our environment consists of offices, houses, roads, cars, suburban gardens and towns broken up by a scattering of fields. This article is simply about raising awareness of our immediate surroundings and where so many of life’s “essentials” come from.
What does all this have to do with Oil? Aside from driving the global economy that makes the level of comfort we enjoy possible, how much of our environment is derived from or has come into contact with products made from oil?
Of the 90 million barrels of crude oil our society of mass consumerism gets through each day, only a portion of this ends up as the fuels used to power our cars and homes. The rest goes to make a wide variety of products that are part of every aspect of our lives.
Crude Oil is a very complex mixture of hydrocarbons varying in size from simple chemicals like methane containing one carbon atom to long chains with 70 carbon atoms or more. Its composition varies depending on where it comes from but typically it is about 84% carbon, 14% Hydrogen, 1-3% sulphur, 1% oxygen, 1% Nitrogen with various heavy metals in small amounts.
Before it can be used for anything, Crude oil has to be refined. This is done by a complex variety of processes that begins with fractional distillation. This is a process where substances are separated by the difference in the temperature they boil at. Some of the most important fractions are petrol and diesel. Other fractions go on to further refining by cracking to give chemicals like ethane and propane and other feedstocks for the petrochemical industry. These in turn are synthesised into ethylene, propylene, butadiene, xylenes, naphthalates and other chemicals that are used to manufacture products we all use every day.
As a very simple way to give some idea of the scope of these products, here is a list covering various areas of the petrochemical industry taken from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) web site:
Adhesives, Agricultural Chemicals, Aerosols, Basic organics, Cleaning and Polishing, Coatings, Cosmetics, Crop Protection, Dyes and Pigments, Glues, Fertilisers, Inks, Man-made Fibres, Paints, Photographic chemicals, Plastics, Plastic film, Pharmaceuticals, Printing Inks, Rubber products, Sealants, Soaps, Specialised Organics…
This list is not exhaustive and it doesn’t account for the higher boiling fractions like the Paraffin wax used to make candles, petroleum oils and waxes used for Vaseline and lubricating oils, Bitumen tars, and the substance used to glue our roads together, Asphalt.
It is worth highlighting a few of the areas on the above list simply to make the point more clearly. Each area covers industries worth millions of pounds with enormous numbers of products and applications.
Pharmaceuticals for example. Medicines come from oil. One of the most famous drugs is Asprin, a painkiller that as many people will tell you comes from willow bark. Not true. The Active ingredient, Salicylic acid was isolated from willow bark but Asprin itself is a salt of acetyl salicylic acid formulated by Felix Hoffman at the Bayer Company between 1897-1899. Now it is manufactured on an industrial scale from chemicals obtained from oil. The stories are the same for paracetamol, codeine, ibuprofen and almost all of the drugs used today.
Dyes and Pigments are another huge area covering everything from the colour of your walls to the colour of your clothes. Up until the middle of the 19th century most dyes came from natural sources and perhaps it would have stayed that way if it weren’t for an accident. The first modern synthetic dye, Mauveine, was discovered in 1856 by W H Perkin while he was trying to synthesis the anti malarial drug quinine. His purple dye started the ball rolling for the modern synthetic dye industry. The company he set up the following year was eventually taken over by ICI which itself is now part of the chemical giant Astra-Zeneca.
Plastics is possibly the widest of the areas mentioned above, covering everything from carrier bags to cable insulation, yogurt pots to blood bags and drain pipes to credit cards. Some of the other industries mentioned above owe their existence technologies derived from our love affair with polymers. Since 1976 plastics have been the most widely used materials in the world. The UK alone consumed 4.7 million tonnes of plastics in 2002.
Leo Baekeland discovered the first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, in 1907, with many of the most familiar plastics (PVC, Nylon, Teflon, Polyester, Polystyrene…) following in the next 30 years. WWII saw a great deal of innovation in the application and use of plastics and the Industry took off after the war. The industry is now worth £18 Billion annually.
Look back through the list above and just think about the things around you whilst you read this. As I write I sit in front of a computer encased in plastic, as is the phone sat next to it. The wires and cables are all insulated with plastic. The table I sit at is made from laminated chipboard, essentially pulverised wood glued together with petrochemicals. The room is carpeted in synthetic fibres machined onto a synthetic rubber backing. The clothes I’m wearing contain synthetic fibres to add stretch, life, or make the synthetic dyes fix better. The chair I sit on is made of an aluminium frame (Electrodes used in aluminium processing are made from Oil residue) covered by synthetic foam, finished with man-made fibres treated with flame retardant. The walls of the room are all painted in fetching modern colours (solvent, carrier, pigment) and I have a (plastic) bottle of water next to me… I could go on.
Trying to live without products derived from oil is impossibility in our society. Without them so much of what we take for granted would not exist. It has seeped into every corner of our lives, we are completely dependant on it whether we realise it or not.
In the rich western world with all our toys and comforts all of us now are born with man-made chemicals in our bodies. Our own toxic load or body burden passed on to us from the moment of conception. More are passed on to us in breast milk accumulating through out our lives in the body’s fatty tissue. How many chemicals and the concentrations vary from individual to individual but studies have found flame-retardants, plasticizers and pesticides, long since banned by the EU and US, in people tested for a range of chemicals known to persist in the environment.
This article is simply about raising awareness as to just how much of our lives are infiltrated by the petrochemical industry. It IS everywhere. What you choose to do with the information is up to you. The areas covered are enormous and what is mentioned here barely touches the surface. Use the links below or any other resources you might find to seek out any further knowledge you might need for your self.
This is just one story of the environment we live in each day. Synthesised and packaged in plastic for your convenience. All of us know this story to some degree. Our cultural conditioning helps us to forget how much of our immediate surroundings we have made for our selves out of oil. We choose not to be aware of it because it is convenient, because for most of us, that is the way it has always been.
But, next time you think of the spirits of place, light a paraffin wax candle with a plastic butane lighter and spare a thought for the petroleum spirits which have been moulded, melted and reacted into some new toy for us to play with.
Nick Griffiths-Haynes
June 2005.
Useful links:
