It’s in your toothbrush...and the tube holding your paste. Buckets, vaseline, paints, pacemakers, syringes, telephone cables, artificial limbs, inks, adhesives, computers...and it of course helps propel our cars and aeroplanes. The list of petroleum based products in our lives is endless.

Today, oil provides the energy for 95 per cent of the world’s transportation needs. The whole industrialised world survives on petroleum. We cannot imagine living without it. There’s billions of barrels of it under the earth for us to use.

So what’s the problem?

	Chinese mining coal from surface deposits. Coal was the leading fuel inChina by the 1000s > BY AD 300s	First vehicle to move using steam. Designed by Nicholas J Cugnot > 1769	Edwin L. Drake drills first successful oil well in US, 69 feet deep in Pennsylvania.Inspires hundreds of small companies > Aug 27, 1859	World oil production reaches 500,000 barrels a year > 1860s

	> AROUND3000 BC Pitch, a sticky water repellent product of petroleum used by the Egyptians to coat mummies	> 1600s Severe shortage of wood in Europe. Focus to coal. England produces 80 per cent of the coal produced. Remains top producer for next 200 years	> 1854 Invention of kerosene lamp. Intense demand for oil	> 1862 Etienne Lenoir patents the first petroleum based or petrol engine