I quite liked this article wich tells us quite a few things that we all thought we knew already!! – Tony Quinn

Oil, oil, oil. It’s all over the news, has been for years. From the price of gasoline to the war in Iraq, oil looms large in many topics, clinging to the public consciousness like … well, like oil.

But what do you really know about it? It’s not as if high schools offer “Oil 101.”

For instance: The furor over oil imports and gas prices and alternative fuels and hybrid cars is normal, from a historical standpoint.

“Since the Industrial Revolution, society has embraced new fuels: wood, coal, whale oil. And within those transitions we’ve had these crises before,” said Peter Tertzakian, author of “A Thousand Barrels a Second” and chief energy economist at ARC Financial Corp., an energy investment firm in Calgary, Alberta.

So this turmoil will bubble along as society comes to accept the fact that our oil supply won’t last forever, figures out what to do about that, and then eventually does it.

Other facts:

— A barrel is a unit of measure.

It’s not something oil is kept in. “In reality, we don’t use barrels for oil,” said A.F. Alhajji, an energy economist and associate professor of economics at Ohio Northern University in Ada. When it’s transported, “it’s through pipelines, then pumped into tankers, put into huge storage facilities and then onto trucks for delivery.”

What may be mistaken for an oil barrel is actually a 55-gallon drum. They’re used, among other things, to create those Caribbean steel-drum bands.

— One barrel equals 42 gallons.

Back in 1859, when American oil was first discovered near Titusville, Pa., it was put into whatever was handy — even whiskey or wine barrels, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association in Washington, D.C.

But that wasn’t very exact. So early oilmen decided to follow the 42-gallon barrel established in 1482 by Britain’s King Edward IV. In 1866 that was further standardized by the aptly named Standard Oil; its blue-painted barrels were considered the most precise. That’s why “bbl” for “blue barrel” is still used as its abbreviation.

— Sweet crude oil isn’t really.

It’s called “sweet” if it has little or no sulfur, said oil expert Mary Ann Tetreault, an international affairs professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. “It’s not really sweet in the sense of sugar, but as in the opposite of sour. Crude tastes about as bad as it smells. Sour crude will taste and smell rotten-eggy.”

Tetreault has actually tasted Kuwaiti crude, which, she said, “tastes more like tar than olive oil.”

— Oil isn’t black.

“Black gold” is actually medium to dark brown, according to the API. It turns black only when exposed to the atmosphere.

— America exports oil.

While the current fuel fracas focuses on America’s reliance on imported oil, our country does indeed export. The Energy Information Administration reports that as of May 12, the United States was importing about 10.3 million barrels of crude oil per day and exporting about 21,000.

Hold it — don’t we need every drop?

“Oil exports occur for several reasons,” said Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow and energy expert at the Cato Institute in Washington. “The primary one is that it’s often cheaper to get Alaskan oil to market in Japan than it is to get it to market in the lower 48 states. Transportation costs are cheaper.”

— Lots more than gasoline comes from a barrel of oil.

Look around. You’re surrounded by petrochemicals. “Most of the items we use on a daily basis are made of materials made from oil,” Alhajji said.

Take your morning routine. Without oil, you wouldn’t have your digital clock, slippers, eyeglass frames (or soft contact lenses), toothpaste, dentures, vitamins, shower curtain, shampoo, shaving cream, hair dryer, deodorant, pantyhose, lipstick or perfume.

— Oil is a top American revenue producer.

The Minerals Management Service, a bureau of the Interior Department, manages the oil and other resources on the 1.76 billion-acre outer continental shelf (our undersea perimeter). Annually, its revenues average more than $6 billion. That’s often one of the top revenue sources for the country.

“It’s an interesting point, and one that is rarely repeated,” said Susan Weaver, an MMS spokeswoman.

— Oil seeps naturally out of the ocean floor.

Especially off the coast of California. In one location near Santa Barbara County, about 160 barrels are released daily, according to the API.

— Oil has a historical society.

That’s the American Oil & Gas Historical Society in Washington, “dedicated to preserving the history of U.S. oil and natural gas exploration and production” (www.aoghs.org). It was established in 1993 by Bruce Wells, now its executive director. There are also “many, many community oil and gas museums” across the country, Wells added.

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