As oil prices continue to soar on the back of the West Asia war, there is plenty of anxiety about how lives of common folks like us get impacted. Given oil’s use in transportation fuel and more ubiquitously plastics amongst a host of other chemicals, it affects all of us.
“The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil a day. As of 2023, oil was responsible for 30% of all energy use worldwide, higher than any other energy source (though its share has been gradually falling). In chemical manufacturing, petroleum is even more critical: an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas. Virtually all plastic comes from chemicals extracted from oil or gas, and petrochemicals are used to produce everything from lubricants to paint to plywood to synthetic fabrics to fertilizer.”
An infographic that recently went viral on social media showed how all these products are ‘refined’ from crude oil. Here’s the good folks at Construction Physics like always, with a more detailed yet simple explanation oil refining:
“A large oil refinery will occupy thousands of acres and cost billions of dollars to construct, ultimately refining hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil each day.
…Oil is a liquid produced from decomposing organic materials, mostly plankton and algae that died and sank to the bottom of ancient oceans. This dead organic matter gradually got covered with sediment, and over millions of years it transformed into crude oil.
…Crude oils extracted from different parts of the Earth will have different mixtures of hydrocarbons and other molecules, which has given rise to a sort of crude oil taxonomy. “Heavy” crude oils, found in places like Canada’s oil sands, will have more heavy molecules, while “light” crude oils found in places like Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field will have more light molecules. “Sweet” crudes, like the crudes extracted from the Brent oil field in the North Sea, have lower sulfur content, while “sour crudes,” like some of the crudes extracted from the Gulf of Mexico, have greater sulfur content.
The job of an oil refinery is to process this mixture of hydrocarbons and other molecules: separating the mixture into individual chemicals or groups of chemicals, and using various chemical reactions to change low-value chemicals into more valuable, useful ones.
…A refinery makes use of several different methods to separate and process crude oil, but the most important process of all is probably distilling. Different molecules within crude oil boil at different temperatures, and condense back into liquid at different temperatures. Smaller, lighter molecules boil and condense at lower temperatures, while larger and heavier molecules boil and condense at higher temperatures.
Oil refineries can use this range of boiling and condensation to separate crude oil into different groups of chemicals, or fractions, using a distillation column. When crude oil enters a refinery, the salt gets removed from it, and it’s then heated to around 650-750°F, which turns most of the oil into a vapor. The vapor is then fed into a tall column containing trays at different heights, each filled with liquid. As the hot vapor rises through the column, at each tray it passes through the liquid, which cools it slightly. When the vapor cools enough, it condenses back into liquid. The heaviest molecules with the highest boiling points condense first, at the bottom of the column, while the lighter ones condense last, at the top. The very lightest molecules don’t condense at all: they exit the top of the column while remaining a gas. At the same time, the very heaviest molecules remain a liquid the entire time, and exit the bottom of the column. Thus, different molecules of different weights can be separated out.
…The gas that comes out of the top of atmospheric distillation will be a mixture of several different light molecules — propane, methane, butane, isobutane (butane with a slightly different molecular arrangement) and so on. To separate this mixture into its component gases, a refinery can send it to a gas plant, which contains a series of distillation columns designed to condense various substances out of the mixture.
The very heaviest molecules, which emerge from distillation without ever having evaporated at all, are known as residuals. Many of the heavier molecules aren’t particularly valuable by themselves, and thus one of the most important functions of a refinery is cracking — splitting heavy fractions, such as heavy fuel oil, into lighter, more valuable ones such as gasoline.”
The article goes on to explain cracking processes in detail with graphic detail of a typical refinery and its various processes. It also goes on to give how refining capacity is spread across the world, a useful input given geopolitical risk. It is notable in this regard that the world’s largest refinery is in India’s Jamnagar with 1.4m barrels a day capacity, a good 40% larger than the second largest.
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