[MUSIC] So we take it in the pipeline, or the truck or the rail car, and where does it go? Where does the crude oil go? It goes to a refinery. The refinery takes this large combination of different length type of carbons and turns it in to the useful products that we use in the modern world. The main part of every refinery is a tall vertical column called the fractional distillation column. Here you take the crude oil and you heat it up. This is dangerous, remember crude oil is 25% gasoline generally. You now have hot boiling, vaporous gasoline. Do not add oxygen, do not add air. Hot, boiling gasoline, hot, boiling oil, vapors. And you put it into a tall column that has the partitions, and the column gets colder as it goes up in the air. And this is designed because as soon as you go from the gaseous phase to the liquid phase. In other words when you approach the boiling point, or since we're going at it from the other direction, the condensation point, that particular fuel, that particular chemical will turn into a liquid, be collected in a pan and come out in a pipe. So let's start with those things that go to the coldest temperatures. In this heating up process, you're going to turn some of these chains into shorter chains, and some are going to turn to just in the gasses. And those gasses are going to go all the way up the column. No matter how cold it gets it's not going to turn back into a liquid. And so from the top of the desolation column you take off the methane, the ethane, the propane, maybe even the butane. You don't get near as much of this as we would if we were starting in a natural gas well, but you do get some of it. The next thing off, that can turn to some liquids are things described as naphtha. These are things that are cyclic hydrocarbons, and intermediate length chains that we are probably going to either use as chemical feed stocks, used in the petrol chemical industry or we are going to reform them. Because the third product, the one that's almost as volatile as the gases is gasoline, is octane and the hydrocarbon chains that are very similar to it. This is the most precious commodity. Refineries want to make gasoline. When we look at our total use of oil products, gasoline, by far and away is the dominant one. If I divided the barrel of oil that comes into a refinery into percentages, in the end a refinery wants just over 50% of it to turn into gasoline. And the only way to get that is to take some of the shorter hydrocarbons and reform them, put them together. And some of the heavier hydrocarbons, we're later going to have to crack apart. So let's continue down our trek along the fractional distillation column. What comes off next is kerosene. Kerosene is 12 lengths type hydrocarbons. And you might say, hey, why do you need to make this much kerosene? Actually, 12% of all the fuel goes into this category. And that's because kerosene is the same thing as jet fuel. Jet aviation, our third largest use of petroleum products. Is not for your kerosene heaters, right? Or to hold up in a nice kerosene lantern, it's to actually power airplanes, jet fuel. Slightly heavier than that, is diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is used, again in a very high proportion, about 15% of this barrel of oil that goes into the refinery. And this is used for transportation as well, for very large trucks, for diesel engines. Diesel fuel is the same thing as home heating oil. In the United States, very few homes, it's maybe a percent these days, are actually heated with oil. And when they say he did with oil, they mean diesel fuel, home heating oil. Many other countries still have a larger proportion of their homes being heated by home heating oil, and it's a product of breaking of crude oil. Gasoline 50%, diesel fuel 15%, jet fuel 12%. We're already up at 87% of the barrel of oil. But there are some parts that are heavier. After we go to the diesel fuel we're going to have some of the heavier oils, residual oils, and lubricating oils. The things that you end up putting in your engine the 10W30 or the 20 weight oil or the lubricating, the grease. All of these will come off in here too. But even though when we think of oil that's going to fill up all the oil cans, less than 1% of the barrel of oil that comes into a refinery ever ends up as one of these lubrication type products. The residual oil, the stuff that's really heavy, that's used in ships. So maybe 3% of the oil ends up into this type of product. Even heavier than that we get really tarry substances. We can crack some of these, because, after all, a lot of this we have to end up, we make a lot more of this to start with but we crack it to get gasoline. I'm talking the 3% is at the very end. We also have to build roads. One of the great uses of this very tarry thick substance is to make asphalt. Asphalt is the thick residual oils plus gravel and it turns into a nice hard road surface. So, when you're driving your car using gasoline, you're actually driving on top of the same barrel of crude oil that made the road. Even heavier, are some solids that are in this process. Coke, this is the coke that's used as a extremely high grade, you could say, coal. Can be burned, and in the steel making process this is very valued, to be able to have a plant that makes this high grade of solid carbon fuel. So a refinery has a column, it breaks it up into its constituents by weight, by carbon chain length basically. Has other steps in the refinery that reform some of the lighter in the gasoline and crack some of the heavier in the gasoline as well. Refineries are very subject to accidents. Now there is a tremendous safety culture and effort to keep these very safe. And generally, refinery fires are quite rare. Just imagine, that if you suddenly introduce oxygen, air, into one of these fractional distillation columns that has hot vapors way above the ignition point of gasoline. As long as there was some oil, some air, as long as there was some air present you would have an explosion. Something like this. In this process of refining oil, energy is used. We had to heat it all up. Not only that, we had to spend some energy in the cracking process, and in the reforming process. On average, a refinery uses 10% of the energy input that goes in in terms of the barrel of oil. The energy content of the barrel of oil, you look at the energy content of all the products and you've lost 10%. That 10% is used in the process of refining itself. You might think, my gosh, what a horrible waste. You mean this 35 quads of oil the US uses, three and a half goes into the refineries. Well whatever, some of that product we actually buy as already refined product, but yes. Somewhere along the line 10% of that energy was used. But that's what you gotta do. because after all, you can't just burn the crude oil. You want to break it into it's components, which takes a bit of the energy itself. [MUSIC]
