Petroleum, also known as crude oil and oil, is a naturally occurring, yellowish-black liquid found in geological formations beneath the Earth's surface. It is commonly refined into various types of fuels. Components of petroleum are separated using a technique called fractional distillation, i.e., separation of a liquid mixture into fractions differing in boiling point by means of distillation, typically using a fractionating column. It consists of naturally occurring hydrocarbons of various molecular weights and may contain miscellaneous organic compounds. The name petroleum covers both naturally occurring unprocessed crude oil and petroleum products that are made up of refined crude oil. A fossil fuel, petroleum is formed when large quantities of dead organisms, mostly zooplankton and algae, are buried underneath sedimentary rock and subjected to both intense heat and pressure.
Naphtha is a flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture.
An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum is transformed and refined into useful products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt base, fuel oils, heating oil, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas and petroleum naphtha. Petrochemicals feedstock like ethylene and propylene can also be produced directly by cracking crude oil without the need of using refined products of crude oil such as naphtha. The crude oil feedstock has typically been processed by an oil production plant. There is usually an oil depot at or near an oil refinery for the storage of incoming crude oil feedstock as well as bulk liquid products. In 2020, the total capacity of global refineries for crude oil was about 101.2 million barrels per day.
In petrochemistry, petroleum geology and organic chemistry, cracking is the process whereby complex organic molecules such as kerogens or long-chain hydrocarbons are broken down into simpler molecules such as light hydrocarbons, by the breaking of carbon-carbon bonds in the precursors. The rate of cracking and the end products are strongly dependent on the temperature and presence of catalysts. Cracking is the breakdown of a large alkane into smaller, more useful alkenes. Simply put, hydrocarbon cracking is the process of breaking a long chain of hydrocarbons into short ones. This process requires high temperatures.
The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transportation, and marketing of petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline (petrol). Petroleum is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, synthetic fragrances, and plastics. The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream, midstream, and downstream. Upstream regards exploration and extraction of crude oil, midstream encompasses transportation and storage of crude, and downstream concerns refining crude oil into various end products.
A visbreaker is a processing unit in an oil refinery whose purpose is to reduce the quantity of residual oil produced in the distillation of crude oil and to increase the yield of more valuable middle distillates by the refinery. A visbreaker thermally cracks large hydrocarbon molecules in the oil by heating in a furnace to reduce its viscosity and to produce small quantities of light hydrocarbons.. The process name of "visbreaker" refers to the fact that the process reduces the viscosity of the residual oil. The process is non-catalytic.
Petroleum products are materials derived from crude oil (petroleum) as it is processed in oil refineries. Unlike petrochemicals, which are a collection of well-defined usually pure organic compounds, petroleum products are complex mixtures. The majority of petroleum is converted to petroleum products, which includes several classes of fuels.
Catalytic reforming is a chemical process used to convert petroleum refinery naphthas distilled from crude oil into high-octane liquid products called reformates, which are premium blending stocks for high-octane gasoline. The process converts low-octane linear hydrocarbons (paraffins) into branched alkanes (isoparaffins) and cyclic naphthenes, which are then partially dehydrogenated to produce high-octane aromatic hydrocarbons. The dehydrogenation also produces significant amounts of byproduct hydrogen gas, which is fed into other refinery processes such as hydrocracking. A side reaction is hydrogenolysis, which produces light hydrocarbons of lower value, such as methane, ethane, propane and butanes.
Singapore Petroleum Company Limited, in short SPC, is a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned company PetroChina. It is involved in the exploration and production of petroleum, refining, trading and petroleum product distribution.
Petrochemistry is a branch of chemistry that studies the transformation of crude oil (petroleum) and natural gas into products or raw materials. These petrochemicals have become a major part of the chemical industry today.
Synthetic fuel or synfuel is a liquid fuel, or sometimes gaseous fuel, obtained from either syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, or a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The syngas could be derived from gasification of solid feedstocks such as coal or biomass or by reforming of natural gas. Alternatively a mixture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and green hydrogen could be used for an almost climate neutral production of synthetic fuels.
Heavy crude oil is highly-viscous oil that cannot easily flow from production wells under normal reservoir conditions.
Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) is the conversion process used in petroleum refineries to convert the high-boiling point, high-molecular weight hydrocarbon fractions of petroleum into gasoline, olefinic gases, and other petroleum products. The cracking of petroleum hydrocarbons was originally done by thermal cracking, now almost replaced by catalytic cracking, which yields greater volumes of high octane rating gasoline; and produces by-product gases, with more carbon-carbon double bonds, that are of greater economic value than the gases produced by thermal cracking.
The BPRefinery (Kent) was an oil refinery on the Isle of Grain in Kent. It was commissioned in 1953 and had a maximum processing capacity of 11 million tonnes of crude oil per year. It was decommissioned in August 1982.
Petroleum in the United States has been a major industry since shortly after the oil discovery in the Oil Creek area of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. The industry includes exploration, production, processing (refining), transportation, and marketing of natural gas and petroleum products. In 2018, the U.S. became the worlds largest crude oil producer, producing 15% of global crude oil, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The leading oil-producing area in the United States in 2019 was Texas, followed by the offshore federal zone of the Gulf of Mexico, North Dakota and New Mexico. In 2020, the top five U.S. oil producing states were Texas (43%), North Dakota (10.4%), New Mexico (9.2%), Oklahoma (4.1%), and Colorado (4.0%).
Petroleum refining processes are the chemical engineering processes and other facilities used in petroleum refineries to transform crude oil into useful products such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline or petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and fuel oils.
Petroleum naphtha is an intermediate hydrocarbon liquid stream derived from the refining of crude oil with CAS-no 64742-48-9. It is most usually desulfurized and then catalytically reformed, which rearranges or restructures the hydrocarbon molecules in the naphtha as well as breaking some of the molecules into smaller molecules to produce a high-octane component of gasoline.
The Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) is one of two crude oil refineries in Ghana.
Petroleum refining in the United States in 2013 produced 18.9 million barrels per day of refined petroleum products, more than any other country. Although the US was the world's largest net importer of refined petroleum products as recently as 2008, the US became a net exporter in 2010, and in 2014 was the largest exporter and the largest net exporter of refined petroleum. As of January 2019, there were 135 operating refineries in the US, distributed among 30 states.
Refining of crude oils essentially consists of primary separation processes and secondary conversion processes. The petroleum refining process is the separation of the different hydrocarbons present in the crude oil into useful fractions and the conversion of some of the hydrocarbons into products having higher quality performance. Atmospheric and vacuum distillation of crude oils are the main primary separation processes producing various straight runproducts, e.g., gasoline to lube oils/vacuum gas oils. Distillation of crude oil is typically performed first under atmospheric pressure and then under a vacuum. Low boiling fractions usually vaporize below 400°C at atmospheric pressure without cracking the hydrocarbon compounds. Therefore, all the low boiling fractions of crude oil are separated by atmospheric distillation. A crude distillation unit (CDU) consists of pre-flash distillation column. The petroleum products obtained from the distillation process are light, medium, and heavy naphtha, kerosene, diesel, and oil residue.
