Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This black-and-white silent clip from 1923 shows footage taken from a river boat of oil derricks on the side of a hill somewhere in South-East Asia. Men are shown working together to lengthen a drill rod and re-commence drilling. The process is then explained using an animated cross-section of the rig and subsurface rock, which shows how the drill burrows through the layers of rock. The clip ends with footage of the rig showing a ‘gusher’ of oil spraying from the pipe.

Educational value points

• This clip shows footage from the early days of oil exploration when the only reliable indicator of the presence of oil was seepage. Today the demand for oil is so great that companies often need to drill many kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface. When the cost of one drill hole can be up to $15 million, much effort is put into accurately determining the likely presence of oil before drilling commences. The main detection method used today is seismic surveying.

• Crude oil, or petroleum, is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon formed underground in sedimentary rocks over millions of years from microscopic marine plant and animal remains (hence its classification as a fossil fuel). The majority of oil deposits are trapped in natural rock from 150 to 7,600 m below the surface of the ground. The modern oil industry dates from the discovery of oil in Ontario, Canada, in 1857.

• The oil the men are drilling for in this clip may have been detected through oil rock seepages. For more than 5,000 years ancient Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians and other peoples used crude oil and asphalt (a semisolid component of petroleum) that had seeped up through the ground for waterproofing boats and baskets, in mortar and paints, for roads, for lighting and even for medication and embalming.

• Although oil and its by-products such as kerosene were used as machine lubricants and for lighting it was not until the development of the internal combustion engine in the late 1800s and the subsequent growth of the car industry in the early 1900s that oil as an energy source really came into its own. Today about 90 per cent of petroleum is used for transportation and more than 500,000 million petrol- and diesel-powered cars are estimated to be on the world’s roads.

• The world is reliant on oil as an energy source: in 1900, 150 million barrels of crude oil were produced; by 1923 this had grown to 2 billion barrels. In the early 21st century we consume more than 80 million barrels per day. Oil plays an important role in international relations: having significant oil deposits has major economic and political consequences for a country and region. Approximately 66 per cent of the world’s oil reserves are situated in the Middle East.

• It is unclear where this footage was filmed but, as the film was made by the Shell Company of Australia, and the Shell Company had merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum in 1907, it may have been in what was then called the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Royal Dutch Petroleum was, at the time, one of the region’s biggest oil companies.

• This clip shows how simple animation can be successfully combined with real footage to illustrate a process that is otherwise impossible to observe. A simple cross-section model is used to show the drilling and removal of rubble at the bottom of the drill shaft. Film animation had begun in the 1890s but was still in its infancy in the 1920s.