Crude oil is measured in barrels. In the 19th century when crude oil became widely commercialized, it was stored in wooden barrels.  One barrel is the equivelant to 42 US gallons or 159 litres.  The picture above shows how many barrels are produced per day all over the world.

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Measurment/ Production

The refining process is a long complicated process that consists of seperating the different hydrocarbons in a barrel of crude into it's seperate parts.

Fractional distillation is the most common method used in the refining process.  They do this by heating a mixture of two or more substances with different boiling points to high temperatures.This is most commonly done with high pressure steam. When it boils, most of the substances go into the vapor (gas) stage. The vapors then enter a fractional distillation column where trays are set up to catch the vapors of the various components. These trays have many holes and bubble caps in them that help collect the various liquids that form at different temperatures.  The range in temperature ranges within the column; cool at the top and hot at the bottom.  When the vapor reaches a height in the column where it's boiling point matches the temperature, it condenses to form a liquid and is collected in the trays.  It is then either passed on to be cooled further and stored in storage tanks or it is further chemically processed.

This is a picture of the distilling columns used in the fractional distillation process.               Click here to visit this site!

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The chemical refining process allows you to change one fraction into another by the use of three common methods; cracking, unification, and alteration.

Cracking is the process of breaking larger hydrocarbon chains into smaller ones to create other products.  It uses steam, visbreaking ,coking,and several types of catalytic cracking to accomplish this.  Go to this site to learn more about these processes.

This is the cracking unit, where heat or catalysts are used to break larger chains into smaller chains. Click here to visit this site!

Unification consists of combining smaller hydrocarbons to create larger ones. The major process used is called catalytic reforming.  A product of this is hydrogen gas.

The process of alteration changes the molecular structure in one fraction to produce another.  Alkylation is the process used.  The products of this are high octane hydrocarbons, which are generally used in gasoline.

This is a picture of all of the units used in Oil refining. Click here to visit this site!