Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 94 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 858 Oil and natural gas distribution Global Resources Speight James G. The Chemistry and Technology of Petroleum. 4th ed. Boca Raton Fla. CRC Press Taylor Francis 2007. . Handbook of Petroleum Product Analysis. Hoboken . Wiley-Interscience 2002. Web Sites OTS Heavy Oil Science Centre The Chemistry of Petroleum http Introduction . Geological Survey Organic Origins of Petroleum http gg research See also Gasoline and other petroleum fuels Methane Oil and natural gas distribution Oil and natural gas drilling and wells Oil and natural gas exploration Oil and natural gas formation Oil industry Propane. Oil and natural gas distribution Category Energy resources The majority of the world s reserves of crude oil and natural gas are concentrated in a few regions. About two-thirds of the world s reserves are in Middle East nations. Saudi Arabia has larger oil reserves than any other country at about 260 billion barrels Iraq the United Arab Emirates Kuwait and Iran each have reserves of about 100 billion barrels. The United States has less than 2percent of the world s reserves. Background Petroleum crude oil and natural gas is a mixture of many kinds of hydrocarbon compounds organic molecules made largely of hydrogen and carbon. Crude oil is refined to produce a variety of fluid fuels which with natural gas provide most of the energy that powers the world s industrialized societies. Petroleum also provides raw materials for the manufacture of plastics synthetic fabrics many medicines fertilizers insecticides road pavement floor coverings roofing materials and hundreds of other products. History of Production Large-volume production of petroleum began in the United States and until 1974 the United States was the world s leading petroleum producer. The United States however was endowed with only about 11 percent of the world s original producible oil so the country was soon ahead of the
