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Oil Refining

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Oil that comes from the ground is a mixture of many hydrocarbons, ranging from light components such as butane to heavy, tar-like materials. (The composition will vary considerably depending on the source of the crude oil. Crude from Saudi Arabia, for example, has a high fraction of light components whereas crude from Venezuela is much heavier.) The water and gas that is produced with the oil is separated at or near the well head.

Introduction

In its raw form crude oil has very little value; it has to be split into its various components in an oil refinery before it can be used. Examples of its products include:

Gasoline for automobiles;
Fuel oil (bunker fuel) for ships; and
Butane gas for backyard barbeques.

Refineries are flexible in the way in which they operate and in the manner in which they can structure their processes. They work with constantly changing feedstocks and product slates. Partial turnarounds are quite common, and they can often handle multiple operations with the same equipment.

Refineries are usually rated according to the volume of crude oil that they process. Of course, other factors, particularly the number of processing units and the range of products produced, affect refinery size and cost. A typical mid-size refinery will process around 100,000 barrels per day. In order to visualize this capacity, a typical tank truck has a capacity of 100 barrels (4,200 gallons or 15,900 liters). Therefore a refinery that processes 100,000 barrels per day would be receiving the equivalent of around 100 full-size tanker trucks of crude oil every day.

Regulations

Over the years, government agencies have placed many restrictions on contaminants that refineries release, so refineries have been obliged to install pollution prevention and control equipment. These environmental rules have had a major impact on the development of the refining industry. For example, in the United States, there is strong pressure to prevent the development of new refineries, hence no major refinery has been built since 1976 (although many existing refineries have been expanded during that time). Many refineries (over 100 since the 1980s) have closed due to obsolescence and/or merger activity within the industry itself.

Chemical Processes

A barrel of crude oil typically contains around 15% gasoline, yet the market demand for gasoline as a percentage of the overall barrel is much higher than that (up to 70%). Therefore simply separation the gasoline components from the crude oil through physical means such as flashing or distillation is insufficient; some of the heavy components need to broken down by chemical reaction and some of the lighter components need to be combined with one another, also by chemical reaction.

Fluidized Catalytic Cracking is an example of a process that breaks down heavier components into lighter fractions, particularly gasoline. Alkylation works in the other direction; alkylate (which has the same general properties as gasoline) is manufactured from light hydrocarbons, particularly butanes.

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