Prior to the nineteenth century, petroleum was known and utilized in various fashions in
Babylon,
Egypt,
China,
Philippines,
Rome and along the Caspian Sea. The modern history of the petroleum industry is said to have begun in 1846 when Abraham Gessner of
Nova Scotia,
Canada devised a process to produce kerosene from coal. Shortly thereafter, in 1854,
Ignacy Lukasiewicz began producing kerosene from hand-dug oil wells near the town of
Krosno,
Poland. The first large petroleum refinery was built in
Ploesti,
Romania in 1856 using the abundant oil available in Romania. In North America, the first oil well was drilled in 1858 by
James Miller Williams in Ontario, Canada. In the United States, the petroleum industry began in 1859 when
Edwin Drake found oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The industry grew slowly in the 1800s, primarily producing kerosene for oil lamps. In the early twentieth century, the introduction of the internal combustion engine and its use in automobiles created a market for gasoline that was the impetus for fairly rapid growth of the petroleum industry. The early finds of petroleum like those in Ontario and
Pennsylvania were soon outstripped by large oil "booms" in
Oklahoma,
Texas and
California. Prior to World War II in the early 1940s, most petroleum refineries in the United States consisted simply of
crude oil distillation units (often referred to as atmospheric crude oil distillation units). Some refineries also had
vacuum distillation units as well as
thermal cracking units such as
visbreakers (viscosity breakers, units to lower the
viscosity of the oil). All of the many other refining processes discussed below were developed during the war or within a few years after the war. They became commercially available within 5 to 10 years after the war ended and the worldwide petroleum industry experienced very rapid growth. The driving force for that growth in technology and in the number and size of refineries worldwide was the growing demand for automotive gasoline and aircraft fuel. In the United States, for various complex economic and political reasons, the construction of new refineries came to a virtual stop in about the 1980s. However, many of the existing refineries in the United States have revamped many of their units and/or, constructed add-on units in order to: increase their crude oil processing capacity, increase the
octane rating of their product gasoline, lower the
sulfur content of their diesel fuel and home heating fuels to comply with environmental regulations and comply with environmental air pollution and water pollution requirements. ==Main Processing Units of Refineries - Treatment==