Useful products from crude oil
Video clips and animations
- A brief over-view of the separation of oil into useful products
Beware: The commentary confusingly treats alcohols such as methanol as if they were derived directly from crude oil. It doesn't make clear that alcohols can only be produced by further reactions of fractions from the distillation. YouTube - Fractional distillation of crude oil
Lab and industrial fractionation of crude oil. Generally good, but there are problems. The molecular models used are awful - try to pick out what is wrong with them. There is also a lot of cheating going on in the first lab demonstration - there is no way they could collect the volumes shown from the tiny bit of crude oil they started with. And don't worry too much about the temperatures quoted in the column - almost every source you look at quotes different temperatures! YouTube
Other interesting or useful sites
- Detailed oil refining from a US government site
More than you could possibly want to know about the reality of oil refining, including a refinery process chart which makes it instantly obvious how many simplifications we normally make for education purposes. - Oil refining from Wikipedia
Includes a similar, but rather more simplified, flow chart of a refinery.
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© Jim Clark 2017
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