I remember conversations years back about paraffin base vs asphalt base motor oils, they seemed to go on forever…
To be fair, they "mattered most" in the earliest days of petroleum extraction and the rather limited refining capability of those earliest days.
Before petro-chemists had found ways to make significant alterations to their raw feedstocks on an industrial and affordable scale that customers could actually afford to purchase, the crude DID matter.
Keep in mind that in-use, losses were also higher as fits were looser, seals were primitive - if even there WERE any seals. Small batch, practically laboratory hand-crafted lubricants, were not going to find a large market as, for example, John Steen's "Steen C" did in later years, or "Mobil One" has more recently.
"Pennsylvania Grade" crude oils were actually useful "right out of the ground" for many of the undemanding applications of the day. Most of the natural gas wells in the Appalachians yielded small amounts of Pennsylvania Grade crude's lighter fractions, sort of "distilled by nature" traveling up the bore with "casing head gasoline" - very nearly pure "octane".
The gasoline, paraffin fraction oil, and some of the other gasesous components (propane, butane, etc) and water were retained or separated out at the wellheads from the most-marketable methane.
"At the wellhead" because all of these were contaminants - some also corrosive as the water was from salt brine - to the collecting pipelines and pumping system leading to further processing and distribution.
Our two adjacent family farms had a total of five producing gas wells when Dad finally had to sell-up from old age and declining health and move into town. We had had at least one well plus a transit pipeline since purchase, 1912.
We owned the mineral rights, got free gas for the farm, 1/8th of the sales price, and "help yourself" to the separated contaminants - that much less for the gas company to collect and haul away.
"Casing head gasoline" had powered my late Uncle's dirt-tract Fronty-Ford racers, 1920's, but also our lawn mower, the maytag gasolinepowerd wringer washer operated outdoors, and tractors - model T derived to Farmall "Cub".
It was "free", after all.
G'Dad had used the raw crude oil fractions to lubricate primitive stationary engines, burn brush, kill weeds, preserve wooden fence posts, kill parasites, and more. Much of it - nearly ALL of it, as we NOW know - was environmentally unsound.
But what did we
know of such things, a hundred years and sparse population density ago? Not much at all until Dad undertook organic Chemistry courses, Marshall College, 1926 (age 16) onward.
In the fullness of time, environmental rules had gradually tightened, causing the gas companies to seal-off those collected contaminants from local access, and haul all of them away far more carefully for safer eventual handling.
This was a "good thing", as their use had been careless out of ignorance, indifference, and that they were "free" and in apparently unlimited amounts.
Over a hundred years had gone by since "Oil City" Pennsylvania saw the start of it. Chemistry, volume, and "magic" of refineries had moved techniques from test-tube of a research lab to gadzillions of tons or barrels of many thousands of petro-derived products, fuels to structural material to medicines.
And here we are, where different flavours of crude oil, "sweet", sour", high and low ash, etc - each oil field's product as distinctive as DNA - still DO have an effect as to what their most economic fractionation fits - paving materials to motor fuels to feedstocks for plastics.
2 quarts, three generations, and 117 years worth