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How an oil refinery works

construction-physics.com

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Re: How an oil refinery works

#161

Post by pfdietz »

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?

One place where gas is flared off is landfills. Methane is produced by anaerobic decay and must be burned to reduce its climate impact.

One unfortunate consequence of this is bird injury, particularly raptors. They like to perch on the flare stack, and when it flares to life... if they are lucky, only their feathers are damaged and they can be rehabbed. This can probably be ameliorated by design of the stack to avoid perching, but that isn't always done.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#162

Post by pfdietz »

kryptiskt wrote: post #23
didgetmaster wrote: post #18

The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products. It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it. Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diver…

You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.

And also by isomerization and alkylation. Some of the processes involved in that involve rather heroic chemistry, using things like superacids to ionize hydrocarbons.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#163

Post by pfdietz »

ufmace wrote: post #52
criddell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the chart in the article I was kind of surprised at how small wind and solar are globally and that coal is still ~25%.

I believe that it's a physical plant thing. We have spent over a hundred years building hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure. Much of that is still out there. Wind and solar have made a ton of progress in the last 15 years or so, but it's only really become substantially better financially in the last 5 or so years maybe. It's still going to take decades to actually replace most of that stuff, just as a matter of…

> a hundred years building hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure

One consequence of that is the enormous of amount of scrap steel that will become available as that infrastructure becomes obsolete. It will noticeably perturb the world steel industry.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#164

Post by munificent »

pjc50 wrote: post #136
jyounker wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make. I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.

Where I live there's been a long running saga around flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt When it's lit at night you can see it from up to twenty miles away. Closer in you can hear it. Things have gone back and forwards on mitigations, fines, industrial disputes, and in the end the plant is closing.

I grew up in Louisiana in Cancer Alley[1]. At night, we rarely got to see stars because the flares gave the sky an orange glow.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley

Re: How an oil refinery works

#165

Post by pfdietz »

gpm wrote: post #34
criddell wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chart is measuring joules of energy. I'm not sure efficiency comes into play here, does it? Coal provides 175,000,000 TJ of energy. Solar and wind provide 21,000,000 TJ. I was mostly surprised at how critical coal still is. https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix

The problem is where it's measuring joules of energy. To use cars as an example: It measures joules of energy as in "how much heat the gasoline we burn produces", some of which we convert to mechanical energy to drive the car, but the majority is just waste heat going out the tailpipe. By comparison an electric car powered by solar has no tailpipe. There's still a bit of waste heat from electrical resistance, but now…

> but the majority is just waste heat going out the tailpipe.

It's my understanding that waste heat in a car is about 50/50 the tailpipe and the radiator.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#166

Post by pfdietz »

criddell wrote: post #60
jeffbee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but were we not looking at TPES before?

Yes we were. Looking at the chart for TFC, the wind and solar case looks even worse. Wind and solar supplies 2 million TJ compared to 36 million for coal. All I was really trying to say from the outset is that I'm surprised at how important coal still is and how little we use renewables. I see articles here all the time about the massive advancements in solar (and wind to a lesser degree) and I had it in my head that…

There is lag created by sunk capital costs. Coal is still producing considerable electric power in the US, but the last time a new coal-fired power plant came online was more than a decade ago, and there are none under construction (although Trump was trying to get one built, to considerable skepticism and inertia). The average age of a coal-fired power plant in the US is 40+ years.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#167

Post by jmyeet »

itsmek wrote: post #125
jmyeet wrote: post #2

This is a really good overview of oil refining. I'll add a few things. 1. The light and heavy distinction is covered by a measure called API gravity [1]. The higher the API gravity, the lighter the crude; 2. Refiners mix different crude types depending on what kind of refined products they want to produce; 3. Heavy crude tends to be less valuable although it's essential for some applications. Lighter crude produces g…

"The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason" California cities still struggle with smog. The valley geography capped by inversion layers are unique facto…

There's a site that summarizes bad air quality days in LA from 1980 to 2025 [1] and I would encourage you to compare 1985 to 2025. Note: LA numbers are skewed by wildfire too. In the 2020s, "Very Unhealthy" days was basically 1 (with 1 9 that might or might not be wildfire related). 1980-1985 had 250-290 *Very Unhealthy" days.

Here's another chart showing air quality improvements [2].

I found a 1985 LA Times article that claims technology was responsible for a massive improvement in smog [3], particularly compared to 1973. And 2020-2025 is so much ridiculously better than then.

California was among the first states to adopt stricter vehicle emissions standards and to change fuel composition (eg removing lead) but the rest of the nation las largely caught up. National emissions standards and national summer fuel blends mean the gap between what CA has and does and what the rest of the nation has and does is now pretty small. That's was my point.

And if you think smog in the last decade was comparable in any way to any period 1960-2000 then you should really educate yourself about just how bad it was.

Lastly, coming on HN and alleging some kind of political bias without demonstrating how anything someone said is wrong really does nothing but betray your own biases. I looked through your comments and you so rarely add data but way more often level accusations of bias. That's not really welcome here.

[1]: https://www.almanac.com/environment/ev01b.php

[2]: https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/graph-shows-how-much-be...

[3]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-05-me-4588-s...

Re: How an oil refinery works

#168

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #111
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.

[deleted]

Re: How an oil refinery works

#169

Post by pfdietz »

testing22321 wrote: post #40
throw0101c wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oil is cooked. BYD is […] By "vehicles" do you mean "cars"? Because airplanes are also a type of vehicles. So are container ships. Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric AFAICT, and are integral to modern life. (Though more marine hybrid could be practical.) I think there should be more of a push for BEV/hybrid cars (and transport trucks), and think more home electrification would be good (though…

> Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric Yet. The surge in electric cars is a driving force for new tech - higher energy density batteries, faster charge rates, longer life, etc etc. For shipping it’s only a matter of when. Planes are harder, but just today electric choppers started flying in NYC. It’s coming.

The entire US jet fuel consumption could be more than adequately covered by fuel produced from the carbon in US waste streams.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#170

Post by bluGill »

jyounker wrote: post #135
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…

Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make. I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.

When? I don't know Houston, but I recall in MN a refinery that made the whole area stink for 10 miles around. 15 years latter I went by and the air was great even when driving buy the main gate. Soon after my brother in law got a job at that refinery and he told me that for a years they decided the EPA fines for releases were a cost of going business, but when management decided to clean up they were quickly able to root cause and fix all the issues that caused "releases." Houston can clean up as well, but since I've never been to that city I can't say if things have changed.
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