oil and natural gas, these unique natural resources are the main sources of hydrocarbons.Crude oil - is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons with other compounds.Refining results in products which are then applied in all sectors of industry, energy, agriculture and households.
Crude oil is separated into its component parts by simple fractional and vacuum distillation.The composition of the obtained fractions depends on the composition of the original crude oil.
Refining goes through several stages: fractional distillation, reforming, cracking and removal of sulfur.
Fractional distillation is the first stage of processing, which separates it into fractions: gas, light, medium and heavy fuel oil.Thus, the primary processing of oil helping to immediately identify the most valuable fractions.
- gas fraction is a simple linear hydrocarbons: butane, propane and ethane.
- gasoline or light fraction - is a mixture of various light hydrocarbons, including branched and unbranched alkanes.
- Fuel oil remaining after the distillation of all the others, lighter fractions.
Further processing is carried out by oil cracking.This results in cleavage of high-molecular compounds of crude oil into smaller, specific to low-boiling fractions.This is an important method of processing makes it possible to obtain an additional amount of boiling fractions of oil, demand for which, especially in gasoline, extremely high.
- The industry uses several types of cracking: catalytic, thermal and reformer.In the thermal cracking of high molecular weight compounds of heavy oil fractions are broken down into low molecular weight under high temperatures.Refining by cracking of both thermal and catalytic, yields a mixture of unsaturated and saturated hydrocarbons.For example, octadecane cracking process can be described by the formula:
S18N38 - & gt;S9N20 + C9H18
at temperatures up to 1000 ° C causes thermal decomposition of high-molecular oil, thereby producing substantially lighter alkenes and aromatic hydrocarbons.
- Catalytic cracking takes place at relatively low temperatures, the catalyst in this case is a mixture of alumina and silica.Also in this case, a mixture of saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons.Refining this method is used to produce high-quality gasoline.
- Reforming changes the structure of molecules and combines them into larger ones.During low-quality low molecular weight oil fractions are transformed, in particular high-grade gasoline fraction.
natural and associated gas - a mixture of methane (up to 90% by volume) and its closest homologues, as well as a small amount of impurities.
main task gas processing - turning it contains saturated hydrocarbons in the unsaturated, which can later be used in chemical synthesis.
Thus, oil and gas processing enables an extremely large range of different oil products, of which the result obtained by chemical synthesis of a huge variety of materials used in a variety of sectors.
