Oil is among the more versatile nouns in the English language. Depending on your recent experience and the nature of your everyday life, hearing the word might evoke images of stir-fry cooking, aggressive tanning, or the "thick" and "earthy" smell of an auto-repair shop.
But today, oil – once dubbed "black gold" as a nod to the inevitable vast fortune of anyone who discovered a sizable oil field in centuries past – has something of a bad reputation.
he first modern method of oil drilling developed by Edwin L. Drake in 1859 is still being used to this day, though the increased demand for petroleum products has required more efficient means of oil production. The world has used 800 billion barrels of oil since 1859, and oil drilling quickly became a booming industry. According to the US Department of Energy, new technologies are allowing drillers to reach oil reserves once considered unreachable.
An oil drilling rig is a structure that houses equipment such as the derrick, pipe, drill bits and cables necessary to extract petroleum from beneath the earth’s surface. Oil drilling rigs can be either offshore for drilling into the ocean floor or land-based. Although both locations bring large amounts of oil to the petroleum market, the offshore drilling rigs have been more in the public eye since the 2010 oil spill off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.
