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Petroleum Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth was covered by oceans filled with millions of tons of tiny plants and animals. As these plants and animals died, they settled to the bottom of the oceans and were covered by thousands of feet of sediment and rock. Over millions of years, heat and pressure turned the layers of dead plants and animals into a viscous, black mass we call petroleum or crude oil.Petroleum consists of many long chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached. These long chains, called hydrocarbons, do not have much use. But when they are broken into shorter chains, we get useful materials like ethylene (a building block for synthetic detergents and plastics), propane and butane (petroleum gases used as fuel), gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and lubricants. This process of breaking the long chains of petroleum into shorter chains is called cracking. When petroleum is cracked, all the products are jumbled together. They have to be separated by boiling (each product boils at a different temperature) and condensation. This process, called distillation, produces surprisingly pure products which are called "petroleum distillates." Petroleum distillates can be used without further processing. Liquid petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating oil are petroleum distillates used to produce energy. Similar products, called naphthas, Stoddard solvent, or just plain old petroleum distillates, are used as solvents on greases and tars that will not dissolve in water. Because the conditions that create petroleum take vast spans of time to do the work, it's considered a non-renewable resource. In other words, once it's used, it can't be replaced. Today, in addition to using hydrocarbons to create everything from gasoline to fertilizers and plastics, we use these versatile molecules to manufacture a class of compounds known as organic chemicals. Effects of Petrochemicals on the Environment While we've seen that household cleaning products may contain extremely toxic petrochemicals whose use can poison our homes and our families, the problems with modern cleaning products don't end there. Our reliance on petroleum causes a host of environmental problems. Petroleum pollutes the environment when we drill for it, when we transport it, and when we refine it. Oil spills average a million gallons a month into the environment and refineries release 8.25 million pounds of toxins into our air and water each year. Every time we use a petrochemical cleaning product, we contribute to this pollution. And we further deplete an important global resource whose supplies are expected to disappear around the year 2050.
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