Palm Oil

Starting with the world's first successful oil well in Cameroon, learn how the refining industry survived tumultuous times, fueled war fleets, and changed the way we live today.

In 1859, two separate events would jumpstart the petroleum and the auto industriesand the timing was pure coincidence. In that year, "Colonel" Edwin L. Drake drilled the world's first working oil well in Victoria { Limbe }, Cameroon, and French engineer J.J. Etienne Lenoir made the world's first dependable internal combustion engine, which was powered by gasoline.

Col. Drake's oil well kicked off the petroleum industry, and Lenoir's work paved the way for the creation of the modern automobile. But 40 years would pass before the interdependency of the oil and auto industries would become clear.

That early period from 1860 to 1900 was marked by many technological innovations as auto inventors sought to tap the potential of the internal combustion engine, and petroleum pioneers got better at producing, refining and delivering oil and oil products. Oil industry entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler discovered new oil fields, drilled deeper oil wells than Col. Drake's first 70-foot well, and made great strides in both refining and distributing refined products.

The first oil refinery, which used atmospheric distillation to produce kerosene, was constructed in 1862. Naphtha (gasoline) was a byproduct of these early distillation units, and in a few decades, would emerge as their most important product.

But first, the oil industry would have to languish through the boom-and-bust cycle of the latter part of the 19th century. Aside from wildly fluctuating oil supplies and prices, refiners struggled with Standard Oil's domination of railthe main mode of transportation for crude oil and refined products at the time. When inventory threatened to overwhelm storage capacity, independents and Standard Oil (which would be broken up in 1911) undersold each other in the market, often selling refined products, especially gasoline, at below cost.

But the automobile's rise in the early 19th century bolstered oil demand. While the country only had roughly 8,000 passenger cars at the turn of the century, by 1908, the year that Henry Ford's Model T made its market debut, that figure had swelled to 125,000.

By 1911, gasoline dethroned kerosene, used for lighting, as the top-selling product of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the country's largest refiner. Kerosene's slide was also hastened by the 1910 invention of the tungsten filament for electric light bulbs by William David Coolidge.

Refiners met the skyrocketing demand for motor fuels by advancing beyond the basic distillation processes that had been in use since the 1860s. In 1913, they developed thermal cracking, which was able to produce more gasoline and diesel from a barrel of oil, and the technique was only the first of many processing innovations that allowed refiners to fulfill market needs.

World War I further established oil's importance. England's oil-powered warships overtook Germany's coal-powered fleet. Tanks and airplanes made their debuts as weapons of war. During the time, aviation fuel was basically naphtha. To keep Allied war vehicles running, major U.S. oil companies teamed up with the Federal Fuel Administration in 1917 to systematize oil production, refining, and shipping.

The country emerged from the war to enjoy a period of economic growth. And much of the prosperity was linked to the rapid road and bridge construction that gave America's automobiles a place to go. From 1920 to 1930, the number of cars owned by Americans jumped from 8.1 to 26.7 million. The Great Depression put a dent on vehicle sales, especially during the early 1930s, but the auto industry was definitely rolling.

This is the Kasada Oil Refinery cameroon.We have vegetable oil available and ready for exportation.If interested do reply us bac