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How an oil refinery works

construction-physics.com

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Re: How an oil refinery works

#111

Post by throwaway7783 »

diginova wrote: post #44

My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for…

Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#112

Post by ok_computer »

whatever1 wrote: post #33
nerdsniper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large…

We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.

Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.

I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.

There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).

Re: How an oil refinery works

#113

Post by spot5010 »

diginova wrote: post #44

My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for…

My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#114

Post by hyraki »

tkgally wrote: post #107

About thirty years ago, I was given a personal tour of an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan. I was doing freelance translation then for a Japanese oil company. I mentioned to one of my contacts there that I would be interested in actually seeing the sort of equipment I was translating documents about, and they arranged a visit for me. Two things stand out in my memory: Even though the refinery was in full operation, we…

Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#115

Post by russellbeattie »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #108
kerlekarle wrote: post #79

Good read. Just sadly all temperature measurements are in Fahrenheit. Really makes it hard to grasp for the other 99% of the world

What if everyone complained whenever someone linked to spiegel.de? Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.

Let me help.

He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from the overall quality of the article and limits its audience for no reason.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#116

Post by whatever1 »

ok_computer wrote: post #112
whatever1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.

Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure. I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible. There’s…

Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible.

https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/press-releases...

Re: How an oil refinery works

#117

Post by aethr »

adrianN wrote: post #105
whatever1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open. Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.

The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.

The answer to this problem as it's currently being pursued is renewable carbon feedstocks. Growing things like canola on marginal land, harvesting it and turning it into biofuels and LCLFs (low carbon liquid fuels) using renewable solar/wind energy.

It's not a solved problem, though. Truly renewable carbon feedstocks have to source their carbon from the air, not the soil, which has to be continually measured. Land selection for carbon feedstock projects has to ensure it doesn't induce land-use change in other locations due to displacing other things like food production, etc. Otherwise the emissions and environmental harm from those downstream effects have to be included in the carbon positive/negative calculations for the project.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#118

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

russellbeattie wrote: post #115
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if everyone complained whenever someone linked to spiegel.de? Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.

Let me help. He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from…

ok so your response is to continue whining even more.

some people start at freezing, some people added 32 * 1.8 for some odd reason. great now chill out

Re: How an oil refinery works

#119

Post by noisy_boy »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #70
didgetmaster wrote: post #61

I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive. Do they still just burn off that gas?

They flare to quickly burn off excess gases as a safety mechanism rather than anything else. Venting gas into the air would be much worse.

Can't that burning be converted into energy like boiling water to turn a turbine to generate energy? Or not worth the payoff?

Re: How an oil refinery works

#120

Post by noisy_boy »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #118
russellbeattie wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me help. He's not whining, he's saying that the people who insist on using Fahrenheit are oblivious, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, closed minded, conservative morons and since no one like that would understand, let alone appreciate, the article then why bother using antiquated units of measure that the other 8 billion people besides Americans have abandoned decades ago. The use of imperial units degrades from…

ok so your response is to continue whining even more. some people start at freezing, some people added 32 * 1.8 for some odd reason. great now chill out

And your response is to be an asshole about it.

I made the extension, thanks for the suggestion. It is still dumb having to do that.

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