Nature's own numbers man

TIMELINE IN PETROLEUM EXPLORATION

Computers are used to discover and recover more oil. The petroleum industry now use computers with thousands of processors to discover and recover more oil and gas.

Any technology is the culmination of a series of inventions and discoveries that took place over thousands of years. This "Timeline in Petroleum Exploration" is a snapshot of developments in mathematics, computing and petroleum engineering.

1666 - 1989
1666	Sir Isaac Newton formulates the universal laws of motion and gravitation and co-invented calculus.
1856	Henry Darcy formulates "Darcy's Law" which became the foundation of petroleum reservoir simulation.
1920	Cheap oil and natural gas becomes competitive to coal.
1920s	Hydrocarbons synthesized to create liquid fuels.
1921	Ethyl gasoline produced
1928	Submersible drilling barge invented.
1932	The first independently drilled oil well.
1932	First on-shore submersible drilled oil well on the West Coast of the United States.
1934	Mr. and Mrs. Paul Fillunger commit suicide in protest against the rejection of Paul's mathematical equations.
1940	First off-shore submersible drilled oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.
1946	The modern electronic computer is invented.
1960	OPEC founded.
1973	OPEC oil embargo
1989	Emeagwali invents a formula that enables thousands of computer processors to increase the amount of oil recovered from oilfields. To achieve his breakthrough, Emeagwali rejected Darcy's Law and invented a formula that unified Fillunger's equations with Newton's Laws.

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