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The Age of Oil,〔The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World's Most Controversial Resource. By Leonardo Maugeri. Globe Pequot, 2007.〕 also known as the Oil Age〔The End of the Oil Age. By Dale Allen Pfeiffer. 2004.〕〔The Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada. By Peter McKenzie-Brown, Gordon Jaremko, David Finch. Detselig Enterprise Limited, 1993.〕 or the Petroleum Age,〔The Petroleum Age: A Tale of Innovation, Risk and Enterprise. By Ruth Sheldon Knowles, Phillips Petroleum Company.〕〔Beyond the petroleum age: designing a solar economy. By Christopher Flavin, Nicholas K. Lenssen. Worldwatch Institute, 1990.〕 refers to the era in human history characterised by an increased use of petroleum in products and as fuel. Though unrefined petroleum has been used for various purposes since ancient times, it was during the 19th century that refinement techniques were developed and gasoline engines were created. Although crude petroleum oil has been used for a variety of purposes for thousands of years, the Oil Age is considered to have started in the 1800s with the advance of drilling techniques, as well as the processing of products made use in internal combustion engines. Alternatively, the age of oil can be placed in the first period until the early 1900s, when oil consumption and combustion engines utilization increased. Contemporary industrial society is built largely on petroleum resources, but the future of the Oil Age has become increasingly controversial. ==History== Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels have been used as sources of energy. Coal began to be widely used after 1800 and would continue to be the dominant source of energy into the twentieth century. However, two events set the stage for the Age of Oil: The first was in 1846, when Abraham Gesner invented kerosene making coal and petroleum practical raw materials for lighting fuel. The second was in 1859, when Edwin Drake invented the first modern drilling process for deep oil wells. John Davison Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust. In 1870, he founded Standard Oil Company and aggressively ran it until he officially retired in 1897. Karl Friedrich Benz developed a petrol-powered automobiles by 1878 and, in 1879, obtained a patent for the practical automobile. The invention of the internal combustion engine was the major influence in the rise in the importance of petroleum. The beginning of the contemporaneous age of oil is commonly thought of originating in 1901 with the strike at Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas in the United States which launched large-scale oil production and soon made the petroleum products widely available.〔Maugeri (2005), p. 15〕 Power by the increased use of petroleum, the post–World War II economic expansion was a period of economic prosperity in the mid-20th century which occurred, following the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the early 1970s. It ended with the 1973 oil crisis. In 1956, Geophysicist M. King Hubbert deduces that U.S. oil production will peak between 1965 and 1970 (peaked in 1971) and that oil production will peak "within half a century" on the basis of 1956 data.〔See Hubbert peak theory.〕 In 1989, another predicted peak was by Colin Campbell〔"Oil Price Leap in the Early Nineties," Noroil, December 1989, pages 35–38.〕 Since the 1960s and 1970s, when petroleum production peaked in many industrialized nations, a frequent topic of speculation among scholars has been when worldwide production will peak, as well as when and how the oil age will ultimately end. According to some definitions the age is defined as ending at the point where consumption outstrips the decreasing production making its use unprofitable or impossible. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Age of Oil」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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