#14 - Knowing What Crude Oil Tastes Like When You Don’t

April 26th, 2008

You don’t know what crude oil tastes like, do you? I do. You’ve seen the stuff in movies, but it’s usually fake. I’ve never seen convincing snow in a movie, ever, and I’ve never seen convincing crude oil in a movie. You probably don’t even know what crude oil smells like. If you’re a thinking person, one who is aware of how gasoline is processed, you might surmise that it smells like diesel fuel. If you’re a thinking person who hangs around at the tarmacs of airports, you might think it smells like jet fuel.

You’re wrong.

In a previous life, I worked at a pipeline which shipped crude oil from the producers on site at their oil wells and sold that oil to a larger pipeline. My job was to drive around to the producer’s sites, analyze the quality of the oil to be shipped, and then set timers on pumps so that the oil would flow to our distribution center. We had to wear scuba masks and don air quality monitors to protect ourselves against Hydrogen Sulphide gas when climbing the tanks which held the oil. It was a summer job between university, so I also had to mow lawns and make coffee. I didn’t have to wear the scuba mask while mowing lawns, despite the fact that that would have looked cool. For one summer, I actually had my own truck with a centrifuge for analyzing oil and an unlimited supply of Varsol, with a high power motor as strong as a car wash’s. It was to clean things that were dirty with crude oil. Infinite Varsol!

Once, while testing some crude oil, I dropped a tube while moving the oil from the centrifuge. It hit the sink in such a way that the crude oil being tested splashed on my face. As luck would have it, my mouth was open at the time. It was probably in the midst of saying “oh” in “oh crap”, so I got a huge mouthful of fresh crude oil in my mouth. Upon tasting it, I said to myself, “well, at least I know what crude oil tastes like now.”

Oh, yeah. Crude oil tastes like blenderized dead and rotting trees. The mouth-feel of crude oil is something like soy sauce that has been reduced for hundreds of thousands of years. The aftertaste is, predictably, terrible. Not recommended.

Entry Filed under: Food, Work