What is Refinery and how it works ?

hi

Oil refining is the process by which crude oil is manufactured into more complex and useful products. This process comes mainly through purification, distillation and conversion of crude oil in refineries.

Oil refineries are large industrial complexes, noticeable mainly by their tank farms, pipeline systems and flare systems. The best known refinery products are petroleum naphtha, diesel fuel, gasoline, kerosene, heating oil, LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) and asphalt base.

Refinery products can have gaseous, fluid and solid forms. On average, around one quarter of a modern oil refinery’s production is gasoline, while one fifth is diesel fuel and light heating oil.

Approximately one tenth make naphtha (crude gasoline) and heavy heating oil, respectively. However, this depends on the types of crude oil as well as on the production methods of the plant.

Refined oil products play a major role in modern life. Gasoline and diesel are inevitable for the whole automotive market, while kerosene/jet fuel is needed in aeronautics. Naturally, the petrochemical industry is highly dependent on petroleum and some natural gas products.

This is why petrochemical plants are often located near oil and gas refineries. Interestingly, many active substances in medicines are derived from refined crude oil products, mostly from naphtha.

The refining of crude petroleum owes its origin to the successful drilling of the first oil wells in Ontario, Canada, in 1858 and in Titusville, Pennsylvania, U.S., in 1859. Prior to that time, petroleum was available only in very small quantities from natural seepage of subsurface oil in various areas throughout the world.

However, such limited availability restricted the uses for petroleum to medicinal and specialty purposes. With the discovery of “rock oil” in northwestern Pennsylvania, crude oil became available in sufficient quantity to inspire the development of larger-scale processing systems.

The earliest refineries employed simple distillation units, or “stills,” to separate the various constituents of petroleum by heating the crude oil mixture in a vessel and condensing the resultant vapours into liquid fractions. Initially the primary product was kerosene, which proved to be a more abundant, cleaner-burning lamp oil of more consistent quality than whale oil or animal fat.

The lowest-boiling raw product from the still was “straight run” naphtha, a forerunner of unfinished gasoline (petrol). Its initial commercial application was primarily as a solvent. Higher-boiling materials were found to be effective as lubricants and fuel oils, but they were largely novelties at first.

The perfection of oil-drilling techniques quickly spread to Russia, and by 1890 refineries there were producing large quantities of kerosene and fuel oils. The development of the internal-combustion engine in the later years of the 19th century created a small market for crude naphtha.

But the development of the automobile at the turn of the century sharply increased the demand for quality gasoline, and this finally provided a home for the petroleum fractions that were too volatile to be included in kerosene. As demand for automotive fuel rose, methods for continuous distillation of crude oil were developed.

After 1910 the demand for automotive fuel began to outstrip the market requirements for kerosene, and refiners were pressed to develop new technologies to increase gasoline yields

The earliest process, called thermal cracking, consisted of heating heavier oils (for which there was a low market requirement) in pressurized reactors and thereby cracking, or splitting, their large molecules into the smaller ones that form the lighter, more valuable fractions such as gasoline, kerosene, and light industrial fuels.

Gasoline manufactured by the cracking process performed better in automobile engines than gasoline derived from straight distillation of crude petroleum.

The development of more powerful airplane engines in the late 1930s gave rise to a need to increase the combustion characteristics of gasoline and spurred the development of lead-based fuel additives to improve engine performance.

During the 1930s and World War II, sophisticated refining processes involving the use of catalysts led to further improvements in the quality of transportation fuels and further increased their supply.

. These improved processes—including catalytic cracking of heavy oils, alkylation, polymerization, and isomerization—enabled the petroleum industry to meet the demands of high-performance combat aircraft and, after the war, to supply increasing quantities of transportation fuels.

The 1950s and ’60s brought a large-scale demand for jet fuel and high-quality lubricating oils. The continuing increase in demand for petroleum products also heightened the need to process a wider variety of crude oils into high-quality products

Catalytic reforming of naphtha replaced the earlier thermal reforming process and became the leading process for upgrading fuel qualities to meet the needs of higher-compression engines. Hydrocracking, a catalytic cracking process conducted in the presence of hydrogen, was developed to be a versatile manufacturing process for increasing the yields of either gasoline or jet fuels.

By 1970 the petroleum-refining industry had become well established throughout the world. Delivery of crude oil to be refined into petroleum products had reached almost 2.3 billion tons per year (40 million barrels per day), with major concentrations of refineries in most developed countries.

As the world became aware of the impact of industrial pollution on the environment, however, the petroleum-refining industry was a primary focus for change. Refiners added hydrotreating units to extract sulfur compounds from their products and began to generate large quantities of elemental sulfur.

From an industry that at one time produced a single product (kerosene) and disposed of unwanted by-product materials in any manner possible, petroleum refining has become one of the world’s most stringently regulated manufacturing industries, expending a major portion of its resources on reducing its impact on the environment as it processes some 4.6 billion tons of crude oil per year

Petroleum refining is the process where crude oil is separated into useful products such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Using distillation, the different boiling points allow the products to be separated. Advanced methods are then employed to further process it into fuels and other products.