Up From the Ground Came a Bubblin' Crude

Black gold, Texas Tea or what ever you want to call it is one of the most useful substances the genius of nature has ever produced. Just open your eyes, and you can't miss it because it's in almost everything you can see. Just looking at my desk, I can see a multitude of stuff that is made from oil. Various parts of my computer, keyboard, mouse, digital camera, my magnifying glass, my son's Bionicle (its a toy), that he left here while watching "Total Drama Island", the router, the glasses my old eyes are looking through, and almost every other thing I have was delivered to me because there is such a thing as the hydrocarbon. 

I went to the "How stuff works" site this morning to get an idea of just what it takes to make all these things. Here's the long and short of it. Oil comes out of the ground, and it isn't all the same. Some is clear, and thin as water, and some is black and as thick as grandma's aspic. Nevertheless, it all contains a very versatile molecule; the hydrocarbon. The raw oil, or crude, as we call it is delivered to a refinery, via various forms of transportation, and it gets refined. But we're not talking charm school here. 

The refiners use a process that it called fractional distillation. Because crude contains all these different sizes of hydrocarbons, it must be separated to get get all the hydrocarbons of the same size and type together in their own separate groups. When one thinks of distilling, images of whiskey or vodka come to mind. It is basically the same idea, except that instead of getting just one type of adult beverage, many are produced.

The process starts with boiling the crude so it turns to vapor (different sized hydrocarbons turn to gas at different temperatures), and as it cools it turns back to liquid at different temperatures. Inside these boilers there are layers or stacks of pans that catch the liquid at differing heights as it changes from a gaseous state back to a liquid. And at each layer a different distillate is produced. One of the major components of the refining process is gasoline; approximately 40% of a barrel of oil (a standard barrel of oil is 42 gallons) is turned in to gasoline by way of this process. Other distillates such as hydrogen gas, naptha, diesel, kerosine, benzine, heavier oils and coke are also produced. 

Naptha is a broad term that means any highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon, and is used in making high octane fuels, industrial solvents, other chemically generated refining processes, and gets into some pretty complicated chemistry for polymers and plastics from here. Kerosine is what all those airplanes use in their jet engines, and is also valued as a heating oil. Benzine is mainly used as a degreasing  solvent for the motor vehicle industry. Coke (not the drink) is used in dry-cell batteries and other chemical processes. The heavier oils are used for lubrication, and further refining by a process called, "cracking".

Cracking is done by taking the largest of the hydrocarbon molecules and breaking them in to smaller hydrocarbons. Naptha is used here to get more gasoline out of the heavier oils. Other refining processes include unification, and alteration. In unification hydrocarbons are combined to make naptha into gasoline. Alteration is where the light-weight hydrocarbons are rearranged to make naptha again and used in gasoline octane improvement. 

What amazes me is that all this comes from the natural process of the life cycle of carbon based life forms. So the next time you throw on that polypropylene hoodie and that helmet for a ride on you motorcycle, you can thank the brilliant humans who figured all this stuff out so you could get bugs in your teeth.