About thirty years ago, I was given a personal tour of an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan. I was doing freelance translation then for a Japanese oil company. I mentioned to one of my contacts there that I would be interested in actually seeing the sort of equipment I was translating documents about, and they arranged a visit for me.

Two things stand out in my memory:

Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.

The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.

My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written

Instantly I'm reminded of "That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572

https://archive.is/kLFxg

Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil"

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact)

And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...

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).

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.

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?

There is a cool game that someone posted a while ago about this https://hnarcade.com/games/games/refinery-simulator

If you're interested in how the oil industry as a whole operates and why, Oil 101 is an interesting read.

NO₂ column density over the Jamnagar refinery mentioned in the article: https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8....

I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive.

Do they still just burn off that gas?

The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products.

It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.

Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.

Fractional distillation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation

Fractionating column

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column

Crikey we have got so far to go with energy production.

Thankfully, the top consumer China, is building nuclear reactors at an unfathomable rate.

This is a really good overview of oil refining. I'll add a few things.

1. The light and heavy distinction is covered by a measure called API gravity [1]. The higher the API gravity, the lighter the crude;

2. Refiners mix different crude types depending on what kind of refined products they want to produce;

3. Heavy crude tends to be less valuable although it's essential for some applications. Lighter crude produces generally more valuable products like gasoline, diesel and avgas. But heavy crude goes into construction (eg roads) and fuel for ships (ie bunkers));

4. Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting. They don't need to be this way. A new refiner would produce vastly less pollution but they're almost impossible to get permission to build now. One exception is the Southern Rock refinery currently being built in Oklahoma [2], which will be powered by largely renewable energy and produce a lot less emissions than an equivalent older refinery with the same capacity;

5. There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;

6. California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth.

The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason; and

7. California doesn't build pipelines so is entirely dependent on seaborne oil imports (~75%) despite the US being a net energy exporter. Last I checked, ~20% of that foreign oil comes through the Strait (from Iraq, mostly) so, interestingly, CA is more vulnerable to the Strait of Hormuz closure than the rest of the country.

I guess I'll add a disclaimer: I'm very much pro-renewables, particular solar. I think solar is the future. But we currently live in a world that has huge demand for oil and no alternatives for many of those uses (eg diesel, plastics, construction, industrial, avgas) so we should at least be smart about how we go forward.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity

[2]: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-...

Good read. Just sadly all temperature measurements are in Fahrenheit. Really makes it hard to grasp for the other 99% of the world

The whole idea of processing gain blows my mind that more volume comes out than goes in.

Also the fact that that oil is different colors (green, red, etc) and not black is always amusing.

if you liked this and the history of the industry, "The Prize" is a fantastic read!

Sadly more examples of how an oil refinery not works lately

What is its weakest link, from a defense point of view?

> an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas

What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?

This doesn't explain anything, but it's a drive-around tour of a now-demolished refinery in Lockport IL in 1989 that operated for 80 years. It's also interesting because it's vintage VHS footage with a quirky French soundtrack. To me it scratches the itch of found footage and backrooms (sorta), plus shows just how massive these operations are.

https://youtu.be/QAkzUAM_ylA?si=VPQuoe7qM_XbbCTh

Cool to see how when people talk about “transitioning off oil” it's more than replacing gasoline in cars. It's replacing this entire global machine.

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We have to urgently stop doing this of course, to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Wars are peanuts compared to the death toll.