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How an oil refinery works

construction-physics.com

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Re: How an oil refinery works

#31

Post by cucumber3732842 »

vel0city wrote: post #20
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I do agree there's a ton of regulatory hurdle to cross to build a new refinery, lots of interviews with oil executives have stated the economics of building a new refinery aren't always great. The reasons why they aren't building isn't necessarily because the regulatory hurdles are too high, its that they don't think they'll end up making any money building them. The future demand of many refined products are…

> This is a circular statement. Its not if you get the context. > The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost I agree, they are a large part. The things they have to do to meet the standards are expensive. The claim was "impossible to get permission to build now". As in, the government won't let them build it. That the standards are just technically impossible to meet. They can get the permission to bu…

"It's impossible to get permission to build something with specifications that is financially viable."

There, better?

These agencies have all sorts of discretion to waive this or enforce that or interpret some third thing and yet they leverage all of it in a manner that stalls progress.

I know a guy who has a textbook perfect situation for a septic in MN. MN won't permit it not because of some law or rule or code, but because the agency has decided that they just don't do septics anymore, mounds only and are exercising their discretion to only permit those. The cost difference is a lot, but less than suing them so guess what got installed?

Commercial permitting of every kind is like that but worse because the public will tolerate way more abuse of business than abuse of homeowners.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#32

Post by icegreentea2 »

criddell wrote: post #25
rollulus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because of the primary energy fallacy: https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-pr... TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.

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 total energy supply figure is a primary energy mix - for the fossil fuels it represents the thermal energy of the fuel. You can look at the final energy consumption section a bit lower to get a different picture taking into account conversion losses.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#33

Post by whatever1 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #14
t_tsonev wrote: post #5

The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.

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.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#34

Post by gpm »

criddell wrote: post #25
rollulus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because of the primary energy fallacy: https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-pr... TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.

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 nowhere near as much.

If we measure like this, by converting a gasoline car to electric (powered by solar for the sake of ignoring some complexity), and driving the same distance, we somehow managed to cut our "energy demand" in half. Despite the fact that we're demanding the exact same thing from the system.

If we measured "joules delivered to the tires of the car" we wouldn't have the same issue. At least until someone starts arguing about how their car is more aerodynamic so joules delivered to the tires should count for more in it.

Edit: We could also go in the other direction. Instead of reporting it as 1kw of solar energy (electricity) it could be 4kw of solar energy (the amount of sunlight shining on the solar panels)... No one does this for obvious reasons, but it's more similar to that primary energy number for fuel in many ways.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#35

Post by vel0city »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #31
vel0city wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a circular statement. Its not if you get the context. > The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost I agree, they are a large part. The things they have to do to meet the standards are expensive. The claim was "impossible to get permission to build now". As in, the government won't let them build it. That the standards are just technically impossible to meet. They can get the permission to bu…

"It's impossible to get permission to build something with specifications that is financially viable." There, better? These agencies have all sorts of discretion to waive this or enforce that or interpret some third thing and yet they leverage all of it in a manner that stalls progress. I know a guy who has a textbook perfect situation for a septic in MN. MN won't permit it not because of some law or rule or code, bu…

You mean to tell me the land of 10,000 lakes might have a shallow water table that might require mounds more often to prevent people poisoning groundwater with their literal shit? The horror. Without hard data about the site I'm probably going to side with the county on that one.

As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements. If the people really want the improvement they'll be willing to help pay for the drainage. But things like failures to account for drainage leads to massive floods hurting everyone in the community. It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.

Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#36

Post by triceratops »

FumblingBear wrote: post #27
shhsshs wrote: post #9

As someone with no real-world petrochemistry experience, but much gaming experience, I was very surprised how familiar the crude oil processing diagram looks. Factorio and GregTech are two prime examples of fairly realistic oil processing lines (probably as accurate as any game would reasonably try to be).

I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.

All the more reason to save fossil fuels instead of burning them for energy.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#37

Post by yread »

I find it amazing how "naphtha" can mean crude oil, diesel, kerosene, gasoline or kind of white spirit.

EDIT: oh and it comes from Akkadian! how many Akkadian words do you know?

Re: How an oil refinery works

#39

Post by testing22321 »

throw0101c wrote: post #19
t_tsonev wrote: post #5

The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.

> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it. Is this accurate?

It must be way higher if you really got into it

i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.

Re: How an oil refinery works

#40

Post by testing22321 »

throw0101c wrote: post #16
tmellon2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil is cooked. BYD is filing 52 patents every single day and has a 700 km in 9 minutes vehicle available TODAY ! Charging by Solar is going to be the norm. Watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE

> 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.

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