How Oil is Refined

When we drill for oil, it comes out in a thick sticky form called crude oil. Crude oil has its uses, but we use oil for so many different things that we need to refine it to get it into the usable forms that we need. We make plastics, gasoline and even carpet fibers out of oil and the process of refining it can be quite complex.

Crude oil is made of many different types of hydrocarbons. Each type of hydrocarbon can be used to produce different products. The problem is that they are all mixed up into a thick sticky substance. To use it, we have to separate the hydrocarbons into different substances. Oil refineries use the basic principal of heating to separate crude oil into the different states that it needs to be in for us to use it effectively.

This boiling process is called distillation. Basically, when you boil oil to one certain temperature, you get gasoline. Heat it up more and you get lubricating oil and so on. Crude oil is heated by a boiler and the products are pumped into a distillation column. The bottom of the column, which is basically a metal cylindrical container, is heated to six hundred degrees Celsius. As the products fill the column, they become cooler and cooler as they reach the top. The top of the column is kept at about twenty degrees Celsius. Pipes collect the different products at different temperatures all the way up the container.

There are many different types of gas and oil that we can extract from the distillation column. From the bottom, the hottest part of the distillation column, we get the thick residual products that come from heating crude oil to the maximum distillation temperature. This is where we get asphalt, tar, and other thick sticky solid oil products.

Just above the residual products, we can get heavy oil. We mainly use heavy oil to make other products. It is in a liquid form, but very thick. Heavy oil is also known as fuel oil because of the fuels that we make from it.

Up a little higher in the distillation chamber we can get lubricating oils. These thick, but liquid, oils are used to make motor oil, grease and other thick lubricants used in heavy machinery and our vehicles. Lubricating oils are retrieved at about two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius.

Going up the chamber, the products get thinner and thinner until we eventually get only gasses at the top. We get diesel, kerosene and gasoline from the distillation process. The thinnest form is petroleum gas. We collect petroleum gas at the lowest temperature of around twenty degrees Celsius from the top of the chamber. Oil companies like Triple Diamond Energy work hard every day of the year to bring us all of these products from the distilleries to accommodate our modern lives.

Bob Jent