How an oil refinery works

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.

https://archive.ph/i3FWt

> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain

You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.

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.

Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.

Let's say a barrel of oil travels 15,000 km from Saudi Arabia to Texas, gets refined, gets shipped another 10,000 km to Europe, then the last 1,000 km overland by truck.

This reasonably well sourced Reddit post [0] says big oil tankers burn 0.1% of their fuel per 1,000 km, smaller ones a bit more. Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.

From the same source, a truck burns about 3% per 1,000 km. This seems too high: for a 40,000 kg loaded truck that's less than 1 kmpl or 2.5 mpg. But let's believe it, double it for empty journeys, and we still only get 16%.

I used very conservative estimates here: surely most oil doesn't travel anywhere near that far.

Alternative thought experiment: look at the traffic on the highway. If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jozd7/e...

https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

Much more energy expenditure comes from refining itself, or in the case of shale and tar sands, in heating vast volumes of rock or sand to liberate the (usually very heavy, thick, and "sour") tar-like oil contained within.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI>

I would not believe it at all without source.

Maybe someone got confused by "transportation" altogether being major consumer?

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.

But the burned up ethanol would be perfectly suitable for products.

Nowadays there are some regulations to prevent that, so they may sell up ethanol at negative prices sometimes.

UPDATE: Ethene, not ethanol.

1) using some potentially useful products as fuel to burning off things you don't want and

2) the buffer to keep non-steady inflows in a suitable ready condition for steady-state processing. (When real world steady-state is less than ideal.)

Number 2 is really what dominates the equation, as shutting in gas sources or even just turning off pipelines is incredibly more complicated than just an 'off' switch.

And turning back on is even more complicated. In the case of wells, once you shut in, turning back on may never result in the same level of production as before.

Cogeneration like that is huge. When PURPA was passed in 1978 requiring utilities to buy cogenerated power it was a major reason for the end of the first wave of nuclear power plant construction in the US.

But if something is wrong, yea you can bet they will be burning off with big flares.

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...

This is the kind of top engineering tech info that you sometimes get on HN, but much more often in the field of software than the less-abstract types of projects being built.

I like to build laboratories that use research instruments and techniques to get engineers and traders the results they need.

I've seen a few misconceptions with more discussion of the oil crisis appearing lately and figured I would add something sooner or later myself.

Anyway I was the early adopter of digital densitometry all those decades ago, and this is one of those rare times when you see API it has nothing to do with software, it means the American Petroleum Institute :)

But turns out their gravity scale is far more abstract than most people imagine.

>We use this unit of measure because it magnifies the differences in densities vs. using conventional units of measure.

Exactly. I've had research people stumble over this.

Well for oils & fuels going in & out of the refinery, they naturally can be quite consistent but always have significant variations in density with each batch and this is normal. API gravity is an excellent measure of density for this reason above all, it depends completely on density (not viscosity at all [0]) and you want these everyday minor differences (in the same feedstock or product stream) to have their numerical density reading show more easily-noticeable meaningful variation than you get from plain kg/m3 or specific gravity numbers. Plus actually end up with two significant figures being adequate most of the time in the real world, and more memorable across a wider range compared to 3 or 4 figures using conventional units.

Now how did the API gravity number end up getting bigger when the density is less? What's up with that?

It's a physical workflow thing. Density of liquids has been measured using simple glass hydrometers since like forever. Same kind used by beermakers to estimate alcohol content based on density, using hydrometers calibrated against liquids having known specific gravity.

IOW, the lighter the density, the deeper the hydrometer sinks, then you take a reading from the unsubmerged portion of the stem. If the scale is calibrated in density or specific gravity, you read increasing numbers starting from the top of the calibrated glass stem. For oils & fuels you also need to know the temperature that the gravity reading was recorded at, so there's also a thermometer in the test sample along with the hydrometer. And people always read a thermometer from bottom-to-top as they count the little graduations in between numbered major divisions. "Everybody knows" the biggest numbers are at the top of the glassware, without any training. But as mentioned, you read a specific gravity hydrometer from top-to-bottom, where the smallest marked numbers are at the top of the glassware. Plus major divisions are fewer and further between than a thermometer. Ruh-roh. For busy people it's too easy to take both readings from bottom-to-top and get wildly or subtly incorrect results. But that's how you are supposed to read (the exact same glasssware) when calibrated using the API scale, which is mathematically inverted and expanded.

So you get °API where 10.0 is the gravity of water, and 100 is less density than you normally get without it being a pressurized product like LPG. 100 is not the limit, and negative °API is also meaningful but anything below 10 and it's usually the kind of tar or asphalt that sinks even in fresh water.

But that's not abstract enough yet. "Specific" gravity however, is basically a unitless number since it is always relative to something else, usually water. Which you are supposed to specify whether the reference material is water or not but it's so seldom documented that the only professional approach is to assume so without question. Provided that's as decent an assumption as it usually is, then for hydrocarbons the recorded specific gravity is supposed to also specify what temperatures both the test material and reference material values were obtained at. This qualification is not nearly as documented as often as it should be, then you pretty much have to assume it's 60 Fahrenheit for oils & fuels plus the reference water too. Looks like being unitless is supposed to carry a lot more metadata that it doesn't always show up with. Oh well. In petroleum it's still pretty strict about 60 F though, but the 15 C crowd has been on the rise for decades, from what I can tell it's because there is no metric integer equal to 60 F :\

The cool thing about specific gravity being unitless is that (considering temperature) you can use any accurate units of measure for weight and volume when taking raw density readings in the field. Grams, pounds, stones, liters, gallons, etc in any combination of weight per volume. Just has to be consistent between the test sample and reference material. So everything cancels and you get the same numerical rating from anywhere in the world at any time over the centuries. Once grams came along, and were standardized equal to one mL of water (under conditions!!) then it just so happens that specific gravity closely resembles the numerical density when the density is expressed in units of grams/mL. In these nearly-ideal metric units though the deceptively similar values are still significantly different from true specific gravity, and the differences often completely neglected along with the buoyancy of air. Which can have obvious significance if you're talking about a ship as big as a blimp.

So the density that the product actually behaves with in the real world, is imagined as if it were handled in a vacuum instead, while being held at some ideal well-known temperature, then converted to a unitless number, before being inverted and scaled to numerically better match the application.

Making the °API "almost like a bogus phenomenon", while still being based strictly on density, rather than °API being as much of a physical property itself.

But it works so much better than the real numbers the physical property is measured in, and the hydrometer does the same thing either way :)

Any more abstraction and the workflow could have gotten worse not better, you've got to stop as soon as you can or you could end up with no trail leading back to the underlying solution needed ;)

With digital densitometry you're not supposed to still need a plain old glass hydrometer, and naturally it's not so simple :0 Don't get me started on that ;)

[0] Although someone familiar with a particular oil field may accomplish some pretty good estimation of API gravity as a result of long term correlation between apparent visual thickness and measured density over the years.

Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.

TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.

I'm also anti-nuclear because it's too expensive, not as safe as advocates make out and the waste problem is not even remotely solved despites all the claims to the contrary. But it's also true that the same kind of anti-development tactics used against refineries are effectively used against nuclear plants such that it takes 15+ years to build a nuclear plant and the costs balloon as a result.

But there's also strong direct evidence contrary to your claim: the new refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Why are they getting built if "the oil industry isn't going to do it"?

I'll go even further than this: if private industry won't build new refineries, the government should. In fact, that's my preferred outcome anyway.

This is a circular statement.

The regulatory hurdles are a large part of what drive cost.

I know a venue that wants to pave a dirt lot so they can better use it for stuff. It doesn't pencil out because of stupid stormwater permitting crap that'll add $250k to the project. It'd never pay off in a reasonable timeframe. So it just continues to exist in its current grandfathered in capacity when even the most unfavorable napkin math shows that what they want is an improvement.

A few weeks ago I was party to the installation of a perimeter railing on a flat commercial roof. The railing cost more than the rest of the job it was there for. Something tells me they won't be pulling permits for petty electrical work ever again.

Oil and most other heavy industry is faced with the same sort of problems with more digits in front of the decimal.

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.

I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.

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 air sealing and insulation are more important, relatively speaking). But let us set reasonable expectations of what is possible at various timeframes (and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good/better).