If you love your car, your motorcycle, your plastic bottles, your basketball, your boat, your skis, your luggage, your dishes, your camera, your computer, your crayons, and your clothes, you can thank oil. Hundreds of products that you use and enjoy every day are made from petroleum, which is typically what oil is made into once it goes through the refinery process. However, technically speaking, crude oil and petroleum are the same thing, which is a naturally occurring, non-renewable fossil fuel that is found in the earth. However, petroleum can also refer to petroleum products that are made from refined crude oil.
Petroleum products contribute to the amazing lifestyles most of us lead (and, truthfully, speaking for the developed world, we all lead an amazing lifestyle when compared to ancient times, the Middle Ages, or even 100 years ago). We lead such an easy life comparatively speaking that most of us would not want to live without oil.
Northern Oilfield Services, an oilfield service company based out of Williston, offers the best oilfield equipment rentals, including wellhead equipment, drilling, and fracking equipment rentals. We offer amazing customer service, as we maintain all of our oilfield equipment rentals to ensure compliance with code. We also offer wellhead and valve parts for sale, rent, or service, from casing heads to plug valves. Below, we’ll take a look at why you wouldn’t want to live without oil. Contact us today!
WHY YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO LIVE WITHOUT OIL
- Hello, horse and buggy. Gasoline comes from crude oil. Without oil, gasoline from alternative sources has no hope of supplying the world’s demand for gasoline. Without oil, your car, motorcycle, truck, trains, and planes would all come to a screeching halt. We’d either have to resort to bikes (oh, wait, tires are made from oil as well, so scratch that), or horses once again. Welcome to good ol’ foot power and horsepower, literally.
- Electricity. True, only about one percent of America’s electricity is generated from oil (most is from natural gas), but how are we going to get the natural gas out of the earth without gasoline to run the extraction machines? Without electricity, we’d obviously be living in the dark, but we’d also have to say goodbye to our beloved electronic devices, including your computer, cell phone, and TV. Virtually no work could be done because you would be too busy trying to heat your home with wood in the winter to work.
- Goods made from plastics. As mentioned above, you can say goodbye to most of your favorite household items. Almost all plastics are made from petroleum products, which composes some part of over half of the items in your home. Paint, medicine, machines, pens, etc would disappear. In essence, without oil, we would be immediately thrust into not only an economic depression worse than the Great Depression, but we’d be thrust back into the Middle Ages. Northern Oilfield Services bets that most of you don’t want to go back to being a serf.
- Eating. You have to eat to survive, but without grocery stores to buy your food at or fast food places to make your food quickly, you’re going to have to go back to growing your own food. And the food is going to have to be fresh since there won’t be refrigeration either. You could fish, but fishing line is made from, you guessed it, petroleum products. Northern Oilfield Services would truly lament not being able to fish.
- Drinking. All of the drinking water that comes out of your tap is filtered water in order to remove contaminants and impurities. Without gasoline to fuel the machines to filter our water, we’d either have a lot harder time procuring fresh drinking water, or there would be a lot more water-borne illnesses and death from drinking contaminated water.
- Housing. The last of the basic needs that we’ve covered (food, water, and shelter), you can expect to go back to tent living. Almost every part of your home is made either from petroleum products themselves, such as your asphalt shingles, or made from products that required gas-powered or electric-power to produce, such as your wood framing and steel reinforcement beams. Northern Oilfield Services believes that most of us prefer our nice heated homes over tents and caves.
- Potential world chaos and anarchy. Because we are so used to the world we live in, human nature would probably kick in and create a free-for-all for the last remaining good made from petroleum products until they disappeared. Similar to Armageddon, wars could potentially break out, people would suffer, and lawlessness and anarchy would ensue. After this chaotic period in our world, society would most likely settle back down into something that did resemble the Middle Ages, with power and money in the hands of a few and the rest of us made into serfs, concentrating wholly on surviving by tilling the land and producing food. This is a world that Northern Oilfield Services in Williston would rather not see come to fruition.
WHAT ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES?
Solar cells rely on semiconductor wafer fabrication, which is a petroleum product, so solar energy would not exist. Bio-fuels rely on fertilizer, which comes from oil, which would not exist. Nuclear power would be impossible because it was petroleum products that made nuclear energy possible.
So what’s left? Wind, geothermal, hydroelectricity, coal, charcoal, and methane. While these would be sources of power for electricity and the like, it would never be enough to fuel the world’s demand for cheap energy that oil products afforded that in turn fueled their growth. Most likely, Northern Oilfield Services notes, these sources of power would be controlled by the elite in our hypothetical serf world.
THE IMPORTANCE OF OILFIELD PRODUCTS
As you can see, the world would be a completely different place without oil. The technological progress with computers, the internet, and cell phones would have been impossible with oil and the cheap source of energy it offers. Our lives would be difficult and much less pleasurable. We wouldn’t be able to fly across the ocean without jet fuel, and we wouldn’t be able to take pictures of the stars, let alone dream of one day visiting them. Oil is a product we need to not take for granted, to conserve, and to use wisely. Hence, you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without oil.
HOW NORTHERN OILFIELD SERVICES CARES
Northern Oilfield Services helps bring oil to people everywhere through the oilfield services industry. We offer oilfield rental equipment for fracking, drilling, and wellhead. We also sell wellhead equipment as well as service them. When you partner with us, we handle the maintenance of your oilfield equipment and ensure they have met all safety codes and regulations.
Northern Oilfield Services exists to make your oilfield service jobs easier. Based in North Dakota, we offer our oilfield equipment rentals wherever you need, including Wyoming and Colorado. When you don’t have to worry about handling maintenance issues, breakdowns, or the like, you can concentrate on getting more jobs, doing more business, offering more services, and enacting more effective and efficient processes in your oilfield service company. Let us help you grow. Contact us today to get started!