Crude oil and CrackingWhat is crude oil?
Crude oil has made people around the world billionaires for a very simple reason: oil's value. Crude oil is what we call unprocessed oil. Unprocessed oil is what we extract from the earth's core and then processed in oil refineries using the process known as cracking, which I will discuss later. Once extracted, it is used for burning as fuel, or processing into various chemical products. Crude oil is mixture of hydrocarbons, a small amount of nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. Cracking: What is it and it's process? A very simple explanation of crude oil cracking is as follows. 1. Firstly, gas oil is pumped through a pipe into a cracking furnace. 2. In the cracking furnace, the gas oil is heated over 900 degrees, causing the molecules in the oil to break apart into smaller molecules. The hotter the molecule gets, the faster it moves, causing it to seperate. 3. Once broken apart, the molecules fly around at tremendosly fast speed, unil they find new partners to create completly new molecules. At this point, the molecules are no longer gas oil, but gasoline, a high powered form of energy. 4. Some gas oil molecules do not break apart in the cracking furncae so they must be seperated from the gasoline in a bubble tower. This is completed by the gasoline flowing upwards, whereas the gas oil molecules get trapped behind and flow outwards like a liquid. 5. The gasoline that is still remaining flows out of the bubble tower into a condenser. In this condesner, the gasoline is condensed into liquid gasoline. 6. Finally this liquid gasoline exits the condenser and is ready to be used for power! An old video discussing how crude oil cracking works. It is quite funny to look back on it so many years later:
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