Whale Hello There

What is the probability of capturing a whale on video swimming by an oil well? The following video shows a sperm whale checking out a subsea oil well off Norway. It is not too rare to see whales at subsea completions (see another video here).

Big Whale

Historical touchstones can humble us by marking how far we have come in such a short period of time. What now seems obvious was quite recently not so.

The following table from the New York Times of January 8, 1862 shows the number of North Pacific whaling ships and barrels of whale oil taken. You can see the pattern of more scarce whales.

(source: The New York Times, Jan 8, 1862. Click excerpt for full article)

In the same article there is a table describing the relatively steady climb of whale oil prices until the birth of the modern petroleum industry in 1859. Increasing whale oil prices were the primary drivers in the search for a new alternative lower cost lamp oil.

As you will know from Oil 101, petroleum had been used almost exclusively as a lamp oil from 1859 until the early 1900s. The following letter to the New York Times of February 8, 1891 shows that although widely used for lighting, the use of petroleum for transportation had been considered early in the history of the modern oil industry. The US government "pronounced it a failure". In the 16 years following the letter below there were mass produced automobiles and the first powered aircraft.

(source: The New York Times, Feb 8, 1891. Click excerpt for full article)

First Post

Check out IBM featuring the book Oil 101 on the front of their global homepage this week (Feb 16-22, 2009). The oil industry is one of the world's biggest users of cutting edge technology.

Also, many thanks to the oil drum for reviewing Oil 101 on Monday (Feb 16, 2009). The oil drum is the leading global oil blog with a fantastic crew of experts.

I was quoted in Barron's last weekend in an article about the spread between heating oil and gasoline. Some have referred to the spread as the widow maker as many relative value traders foundered on it over the past year.

I called this blog 'Scarce Whales' as one of the many possible titles for Oil 101 was 'Scarce Whales and Dark Nights', which following visits to Nantucket, the 18th century Saudi Arabia, and reading about the whaleship Essex, I thought had a nice ring to it harking back to the the reason the modern oil industry sprang up (lack of inexpensive whales and a need for cheap lighting). The 'Dark Nights' part seemed a little too pessimistic and simply calling the book 'Scarce Whales' could have relegated it to the fisheries section of book shops.