13 ms·

How an oil refinery works

541 points by chmaynard 5mo ago

jmyeet 5mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity [2]: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-green-energy-refinery-to-be-built-in-cushing/70251897007/ https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-...
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  > Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting India's Reliance is also investing $300B [0] in a Texas megarefinery [1] in specifically for cleaner and more efficient shale refining. This is deeply technical and complex but low margins work (semiconductor fabrication falls in the same boat) which saw this industry leave for abroad in the 2000s and 2010s when other states like China and India subsidized their refinery industries to build domestic capacity for a number of petroleum byproducts with industrial applications. This is the same strategy Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used in the 1960s-90s as well. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani-s-300-billion-texas-hedge-is-a-nod-to-maga https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani... [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-goes-from-trump-foe-to-friend-with-oil-refinery-pledge https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- criddell 5mo ago
  Looking at the chart in the article I was kind of surprised at how small wind and solar are globally and that coal is still ~25%.
  - rollulus 5mo ago
    That’s because of the primary energy fallacy: https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-primary-energy-fallacy-167f53c58961 https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-pr... TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.
    - criddell 5mo ago
      That chart is measuring joules of energy. I'm not sure efficiency comes into play here, does it? Coal provides 175,000,000 TJ of energy. Solar and wind provide 21,000,000 TJ. I was mostly surprised at how critical coal still is. https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
t_tsonev 5mo ago
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.
- tmellon2 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- nerdsniper 5mo ago
  To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
  - whatever1 5mo ago
    We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. 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.
    - sonofhans 5mo ago
      That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
      - whatever1 5mo ago
arlobish 5mo ago
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.
- tmellon2 5mo ago
  Oil is cooked. BYD is filing 52 patents every single day and has a 700 km in 9 minutes vehicle available TODAY ! Charging by Solar is going to be the norm. Watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE
  - throw0101c 5mo ago
    > Oil is cooked. BYD is […] 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).
    - testing22321 5mo ago
      > Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric Yet. The surge in electric cars is a driving force for new tech - higher energy density batteries, faster charge rates, longer life, etc etc. For shipping it’s only a matter of when. Planes are harder, but just today electric choppers started flying in NYC. It’s coming.
      - throw0101c 5mo ago
        I'm not against hoping that things will improve, but there's a lot of handwaving here, and an indeterminate path to "oil is cooked". Remember that oil/petroleum is used in things like plastics, fertilizer, lubrication, non-natural-rubber seals/gaskets, LNG extraction has helium extraction has a by-product. Reduction in oil-for-transportation can be reduced (thus reducing climate change effects), with oil-for-other-things still being a thing.
shhsshs 5mo ago
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).
- FumblingBear 5mo ago
  I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
  - triceratops 5mo ago
    All the more reason to save fossil fuels instead of burning them for energy.
    - protocolture 5mo ago
      >triceratops Hurry up and become crude oil.
      - damnitbuilds 5mo ago
        Very good. Why I still come here.
      - triceratops 5mo ago
        Lol
- addybojangles 5mo ago
  ABSOLUTELY first thing that popped into my head, too. Fantastic read.
- KolibriFly 5mo ago
  Factory games are weirdly good at teaching the "shape" of these systems
tmellon2 5mo ago
[flagged]
didgetmaster 5mo ago
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.
- kryptiskt 5mo ago
  You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.
  - pfdietz 5mo ago
    And also by isomerization and alkylation. Some of the processes involved in that involve rather heroic chemistry, using things like superacids to ionize hydrocarbons.
- icegreentea2 5mo ago
  Some crude averages from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/refining-crude-oil.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... ~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.
- fuzzfactor 5mo ago
  >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 It is extremely variable, crude oils are amazingly diverse.
noer 5mo ago
If you're interested in how the oil industry as a whole operates and why, Oil 101 is an interesting read.
- balderdash 5mo ago
  Highly recommend
- gf263 5mo ago
  By Morgan Downey?
yread 5mo ago
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?
- TheJoeMan 5mo ago
  And RP-1 Rocket Fuel and Jet-A Jet Fuel are both Kerosene!
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 5mo ago
  That etymology is fascinating, thanks.
tolerance 5mo ago
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572 https://archive.is/kLFxg https://archive.is/kLFxg Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet-money-buys-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...
diginova 5mo ago
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
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well. It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners. What a massive shift in just 25 years. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-goes-from-trump-foe-to-friend-with-oil-refinery-pledge https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
  - mlinhares 5mo ago
    When all you can produce are finance bros this is the result.
  - caminante 5mo ago
    Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity. > 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.
    - alephnerd 5mo ago
      [flagged]
lasermatts 5mo ago
if you liked this and the history of the industry, "The Prize" is a fantastic read!
- kerlekarle 5mo ago
  I read it right now. It was awesome to have this article by the side to understand the mechanics and not only the history and the power play
- jyounker 5mo ago
  The prize is a great book, you just have to keep the author's point of view in mind. (He's got a few blind spots with respect to the downsides of oil.) The book does an amazing job of explaining the strategic structure of WWII in a simple and clear and way. If you want to understand modern history, you can't skip it. It's also a just a riveting read full of wild characters.
didgetmaster 5mo ago
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?
- chasd00 5mo ago
  the way it was explained to me is if you see the flares then something is wrong. It may not be catastrophic or anything serious but something isn't going according to plan. Because you're right, why burn it off when you can sell it?
  - beerandt 5mo ago
    It generally means something is out of balance, which doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong. Usually not. But if something is wrong, yea you can bet they will be burning off with big flares.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- the-grump 5mo ago
  It's usually a small amount of waste, and handling gas is very different from distillate. You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.
- sushibowl 5mo ago
  Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for. Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process. Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.
phplovesong 5mo ago
* Ukraine has entered the chat *
kerlekarle 5mo ago
Good read. Just sadly all temperature measurements are in Fahrenheit. Really makes it hard to grasp for the other 99% of the world
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
  What if everyone complained whenever someone linked to spiegel.de? Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.
  - russellbeattie 5mo ago
    Let me help. 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.
    - tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
      ok so your response is to continue whining even more. some people start at freezing, some people added 32 * 1.8 for some odd reason. great now chill out
      - noisy_boy 5mo ago
        And your response is to be an asshole about it. I made the extension, thanks for the suggestion. It is still dumb having to do that.
      - russellbeattie 5mo ago
        Hah... Your response proves my point quite well, thanks!
- refurb 5mo ago
cachius 5mo ago
Sadly more examples of how an oil refinery not works lately
amelius 5mo ago
What is its weakest link, from a defense point of view?
- thelastgallon 5mo ago
  The supply of crude, from across the oceans.
  - amelius 5mo ago
    And in Russia?
ChristopherDrum 5mo ago
Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact) And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...
- EdwardDiego 5mo ago
  Reminds me of the shareware nuclear power plant sims built for a similar purpose I used to play.
- tosti 5mo ago
  If we're playing games, SpaceChem was one of the coolest games I've ever played.
gosub100 5mo ago
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 https://youtu.be/QAkzUAM_ylA?si=VPQuoe7qM_XbbCTh
next_xibalba 5mo ago
> 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?
- throwaway173738 5mo ago
  Maybe. It might also require not using as much disposable stuff in favor of reusable things. The culture we’ve built around disposable plastics and such is less than 100 years old. Our great grandparents lived considerably differently.
exabrial 5mo ago
Crikey we have got so far to go with energy production. Thankfully, the top consumer China, is building nuclear reactors at an unfathomable rate.
rolph 5mo ago
Fractional distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation Fractionating column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column
tkgally 5mo ago
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.
- hyraki 5mo ago
  Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.
- jyounker 5mo ago
  Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make. I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    Where I live there's been a long running saga around flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt 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.
balderdash 5mo ago
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.
fulafel 5mo ago
We have to urgently stop doing this of course, to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Wars are peanuts compared to the death toll.
tomtomistaken 5mo ago
NO₂ column density over the Jamnagar refinery mentioned in the article: https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8.40&cities=1&speed=200&sidebar=closed https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8....
yuppiepuppie 5mo ago
There is a cool game that someone posted a while ago about this https://hnarcade.com/games/games/refinery-simulator https://hnarcade.com/games/games/refinery-simulator
mfgadv99 5mo ago
[dead]
KolibriFly 5mo ago
What always strikes me about refineries is how "simple" some of the core ideas are in isolation

541 points by chmaynard 5mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity [2]: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-green-energy-refinery-to-be-built-in-cushing/70251897007/ https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-...

alephnerd 5mo ago
> Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting India's Reliance is also investing $300B [0] in a Texas megarefinery [1] in specifically for cleaner and more efficient shale refining. This is deeply technical and complex but low margins work (semiconductor fabrication falls in the same boat) which saw this industry leave for abroad in the 2000s and 2010s when other states like China and India subsidized their refinery industries to build domestic capacity for a number of petroleum byproducts with industrial applications. This is the same strategy Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used in the 1960s-90s as well. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani-s-300-billion-texas-hedge-is-a-nod-to-maga https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani... [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-goes-from-trump-foe-to-friend-with-oil-refinery-pledge https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
criddell 5mo ago
Looking at the chart in the article I was kind of surprised at how small wind and solar are globally and that coal is still ~25%.
- rollulus 5mo ago
  That’s because of the primary energy fallacy: https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-primary-energy-fallacy-167f53c58961 https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-pr... TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    That chart is measuring joules of energy. I'm not sure efficiency comes into play here, does it? Coal provides 175,000,000 TJ of energy. Solar and wind provide 21,000,000 TJ. I was mostly surprised at how critical coal still is. https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix

t_tsonev 5mo ago

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.

tmellon2 5mo ago
[flagged]
nerdsniper 5mo ago
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials. I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
- whatever1 5mo ago
  We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics. 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.
  - sonofhans 5mo ago
    That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
    - whatever1 5mo ago

arlobish 5mo ago

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.

tmellon2 5mo ago
Oil is cooked. BYD is filing 52 patents every single day and has a 700 km in 9 minutes vehicle available TODAY ! Charging by Solar is going to be the norm. Watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE
- throw0101c 5mo ago
  > Oil is cooked. BYD is […] 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).
  - testing22321 5mo ago
    > Neither of which are very practicable with pure electric Yet. The surge in electric cars is a driving force for new tech - higher energy density batteries, faster charge rates, longer life, etc etc. For shipping it’s only a matter of when. Planes are harder, but just today electric choppers started flying in NYC. It’s coming.
    - throw0101c 5mo ago
      I'm not against hoping that things will improve, but there's a lot of handwaving here, and an indeterminate path to "oil is cooked". Remember that oil/petroleum is used in things like plastics, fertilizer, lubrication, non-natural-rubber seals/gaskets, LNG extraction has helium extraction has a by-product. Reduction in oil-for-transportation can be reduced (thus reducing climate change effects), with oil-for-other-things still being a thing.

shhsshs 5mo ago

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).

FumblingBear 5mo ago
I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
- triceratops 5mo ago
  All the more reason to save fossil fuels instead of burning them for energy.
  - protocolture 5mo ago
    >triceratops Hurry up and become crude oil.
    - damnitbuilds 5mo ago
      Very good. Why I still come here.
    - triceratops 5mo ago
      Lol
addybojangles 5mo ago
ABSOLUTELY first thing that popped into my head, too. Fantastic read.
KolibriFly 5mo ago
Factory games are weirdly good at teaching the "shape" of these systems

tmellon2 5mo ago

[flagged]

didgetmaster 5mo ago

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.

kryptiskt 5mo ago
You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.
- pfdietz 5mo ago
  And also by isomerization and alkylation. Some of the processes involved in that involve rather heroic chemistry, using things like superacids to ionize hydrocarbons.
icegreentea2 5mo ago
Some crude averages from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/refining-crude-oil.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... ~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.
fuzzfactor 5mo ago
>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 It is extremely variable, crude oils are amazingly diverse.

noer 5mo ago

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

balderdash 5mo ago
Highly recommend
gf263 5mo ago
By Morgan Downey?

yread 5mo ago

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?

TheJoeMan 5mo ago
And RP-1 Rocket Fuel and Jet-A Jet Fuel are both Kerosene!
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
pfdietz 5mo ago
That etymology is fascinating, thanks.

tolerance 5mo ago

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572 https://archive.is/kLFxg https://archive.is/kLFxg Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet-money-buys-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

diginova 5mo ago

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

alephnerd 5mo ago
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well. It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners. What a massive shift in just 25 years. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-goes-from-trump-foe-to-friend-with-oil-refinery-pledge https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
- mlinhares 5mo ago
  When all you can produce are finance bros this is the result.
- caminante 5mo ago
  Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity. > 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.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    [flagged]

lasermatts 5mo ago

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

kerlekarle 5mo ago
I read it right now. It was awesome to have this article by the side to understand the mechanics and not only the history and the power play
jyounker 5mo ago
The prize is a great book, you just have to keep the author's point of view in mind. (He's got a few blind spots with respect to the downsides of oil.) The book does an amazing job of explaining the strategic structure of WWII in a simple and clear and way. If you want to understand modern history, you can't skip it. It's also a just a riveting read full of wild characters.

didgetmaster 5mo ago

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?

chasd00 5mo ago
the way it was explained to me is if you see the flares then something is wrong. It may not be catastrophic or anything serious but something isn't going according to plan. Because you're right, why burn it off when you can sell it?
- beerandt 5mo ago
  It generally means something is out of balance, which doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong. Usually not. But if something is wrong, yea you can bet they will be burning off with big flares.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
the-grump 5mo ago
It's usually a small amount of waste, and handling gas is very different from distillate. You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.
sushibowl 5mo ago
Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for. Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process. Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.

phplovesong 5mo ago

* Ukraine has entered the chat *

kerlekarle 5mo ago

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

tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
What if everyone complained whenever someone linked to spiegel.de? Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.
- russellbeattie 5mo ago
  Let me help. 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.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
    ok so your response is to continue whining even more. some people start at freezing, some people added 32 * 1.8 for some odd reason. great now chill out
    - noisy_boy 5mo ago
      And your response is to be an asshole about it. I made the extension, thanks for the suggestion. It is still dumb having to do that.
    - russellbeattie 5mo ago
      Hah... Your response proves my point quite well, thanks!
refurb 5mo ago

cachius 5mo ago

Sadly more examples of how an oil refinery not works lately

amelius 5mo ago

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

thelastgallon 5mo ago
The supply of crude, from across the oceans.
- amelius 5mo ago
  And in Russia?

ChristopherDrum 5mo ago

Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact) And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...

EdwardDiego 5mo ago
Reminds me of the shareware nuclear power plant sims built for a similar purpose I used to play.
tosti 5mo ago
If we're playing games, SpaceChem was one of the coolest games I've ever played.

gosub100 5mo ago

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

next_xibalba 5mo ago

> 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?

throwaway173738 5mo ago
Maybe. It might also require not using as much disposable stuff in favor of reusable things. The culture we’ve built around disposable plastics and such is less than 100 years old. Our great grandparents lived considerably differently.

exabrial 5mo ago

Crikey we have got so far to go with energy production. Thankfully, the top consumer China, is building nuclear reactors at an unfathomable rate.

rolph 5mo ago

Fractional distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation Fractionating column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionating_column

tkgally 5mo ago

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.

hyraki 5mo ago
Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.
jyounker 5mo ago
Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make. I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Where I live there's been a long running saga around flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt 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.

balderdash 5mo ago

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.

fulafel 5mo ago

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

tomtomistaken 5mo ago

NO₂ column density over the Jamnagar refinery mentioned in the article: https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8.40&cities=1&speed=200&sidebar=closed https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8....

yuppiepuppie 5mo ago

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

mfgadv99 5mo ago

[dead]

KolibriFly 5mo ago

What always strikes me about refineries is how "simple" some of the core ideas are in isolation