How does crude oil become gasoline

Next come the lubricating oils. These oils no longer vaporize in any way at normal temperatures. For example, engine oil can run all day at degrees F degrees C without vaporizing at all.

Oils go from very light like 3-in-1 oil through various thicknesses of motor oil through very thick gear oils and then semi-solid greases. Vasoline falls in there as well. Chains above the C20 range form solids, starting with paraffin wax, then tar and finally asphaltic bitumen, which used to make asphalt roads.

All of these different substances come from crude oil. The only difference is the length of the carbon chains! Sign up for our Newsletter! What is a Refinery? A Lesson in How to Make Gasoline. An oil refinery is a more than just a complicated maze of steel towers and pipes.

It is actually a factory that takes crude oil and turns it into gasoline and hundreds of other products necessary for our modern society to function. Large refineries are complex operations that run days a year, employ as many as 2, people, and may occupy as much land as several hundred football fields. Some are so big and sprawling that workers need to ride bicycles just to get from one part of the refinery complex to another.

Yet refineries of today had surprisingly humble origins. For example, Kern County pioneers in the 's used mule-drawn wagons to haul a primitive still to a spot near the modern intersection of Twissleman Road and Highway 33 to erect the Buena Vista refinery. This pioneer operation boiled a few barrels a day of tarry oil, dipped by hand from shallow shafts that represented Kern County's first oil wells, to produce kerosene for lamps, lubricants for wagon wheels, waxes for candles, and gasoline--a clear, lightweight liquid that was usually thrown away as a useless byproduct.

The lowly status of gasoline changed dramatically, when Charles Duryea in built the first gas-powered automobile in the United States.

Within just a few short years cars became engrained our society, and the light stuff from crude oil became the right stuff.

Today, refineries turn more than half of every gallon barrel of crude oil into gasoline. This is a remarkable advance from 70 years ago when each barrel of crude yielded only 11 gallons of gasoline.

How does this remarkable transformation take place? Actually, there are three basic steps common to all refining operations, whether big or small, simple or complex. First, the separation process separates crude oil into various chemical components.

Refineries also come in different sizes Footnote 1. Description: This figure shows a schematic of a basic refinery, including an atmospheric distillation tower and the various units and products they produce.

In the first step of the refining process, crude oil is heated in a furnace until most of it vaporizes into a gas. The liquids and vapours then enter an atmospheric distillation tower, which separates the liquids and vapours into different streams, or fractions, based on differences in boiling points. Heavier streams, which have higher boiling points, are collected at the bottom of the tower in liquid form. Meanwhile, lighter streams like gasoline vapours, naphtha, and kerosene, which boil and condense at lower temperatures, rise to the top of the tower in gaseous form where they are collected.

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