How to Make Petrol or Gas from Crude Oil.

we used to think that in the future we'd all be zooming around in flying cars that run on flowers and smiles well this is the future and oil is still the lifeblood of the modern world the world's roads are packed with 800 million greedy vehicles guzzling their way through 7 billion liters of petrol keeping the fuel lines flowing safely with this flammable liquid demands a potent mix of engineering brilliance chemical wizardry and mucky manual labor so how do they do it Texas USA from the look of this hot barren windswept landscape you'd be forgiven for assuming this area must be a rural backwater but in fact this is one of the richest spots in the world because Texas is home to the American oil industry [Music] they've been drilling for oil here since 1894 but it wasn't until 1901 that the oil boom really took off when at a stroke the Lukas gusher tripled US oil production since then almost sixty billion barrels have been pumped out from the Texan soil and if the oil companies have got their sums right there are reserves of another ten billion barrels or so still to be extracted the sticky smelly black liquid they're after is crude oil which is the raw material needed for making petrol it was formed from the remains of tiny sea plants and animals during the Permian period thanks to the action of heat and pressure 250 million years later they've been transformed into one of the world's most vital energy sources this is black gold Texas tea the best there is it smells like rotten eggs but it also smells like money on this hot sticky Texas morning the crew of Derek Riggs 62 are setting to work sinking and nuwell every month more than a thousand new wells are drilled here in Texas and together they pump out over 900,000 barrels of crude every day to keep that all flowing producers like Occidental Petroleum will sink more than a hundred wells a year so for guys like Rick Baker this hot noisy back-breaking work is very much just another day at the office but the team faced an arduous task getting the oil out in this area known as the Permian Basin the crude lies up to two miles down trapped in rocks over 250 million years old to reach it they use the Derrick's huge motors to grind a diamond-tipped drill bit deep into the earth but all the friction creates huge amounts of heat so high-pressure drilling fluid is pumped down a pipe to cool the cutting head the fluid then carries the cuttings back to the surface where they're left to settle out in mud pits it's noisy dangerous work Rick needs to keep the pressure on the drill bit just right too little and it won't cut too much and it will fracture what's more he must constantly be on guard for the threat of gas releases which could cause catastrophic explosions as they drill the team need to regularly attach new nine meter lengths of drilling pipe using an enormous five ton automated wrench called an iron roughneck with the drill head burrowing at around five meters an hour this arduous task must be repeated every couple of hours 24 hours a day the drilling only intermittently halted to line the well eventually if they're lucky they strike oil initially the pressure of the trapped oil forces it through small holes in the finished pipe and up to the surface but this natural pressure doesn't last forever so to keep the crude flowing they use one of these this is called a pumping jack or knotting donkey the circular motion of the powered flywheel is converted into vertical motion and like an enormous metal syringe it sucks the oil to the surface dotted across the empty Plains these quietly insistent nodding donkeys harvest the black gold of Texas but these oil fields are many miles from where the crude oil is needed so a series of pumps feed it to a pipeline and off on a 500-mile journey to the other side of the state this extraordinary citadel of gleaming silver pipe work is Baytown less than 30 miles from Houston it looks like something out of Blade Runner and is the single largest oil refinery in the whole of the u.s. with over 5,000 miles of metal piping spread across 2,400 acres this place can refine 560 thousand barrels of crude oil every day not only does it get incredibly hot here the noise is so deafening it's 4,000 strong workforce get through over a million ear protectors every year this place is so huge as well as Texan crude oil it also sucks in supplies from all around the world to satisfy bay town's thirst vast 300 meter long tankers arrive at the specially constructed docks [Music] over 20 of these massive vessels arrive every month each one delivering up to 3 million barrels from their huge holds as much oil as everywhere in Texas produces in 3 and a half days the thing about crude oil is its crude even if you could get that stuff into your petrol tank and somehow set fire to it it wouldn't provide the instant explosive power that internal combustion craves to be honest you'd be better off coating your driveway with it than driving with it to become usable fuel it has to be refined so at the heart of the refinery lies the laboratory headed by Joyce bussy it's up to Joyce's lab to supervise the process of turning the crude oil into usable products [Music] crude oil in the state is not very useful at all if you put this in your tank you'd be sorry because it wouldn't go anywhere [Music] the trouble with crude oil is it contains a mix of hydrocarbons each of which has a different number of carbon atoms the hydrocarbons are different in weight the lightest is propane while the heaviest is used to make asphalt [Applause] extracting petrol from this mix is a formidable challenge and it requires one heck of a chemistry set to do it the most important part of the plant is this like a moonshine still as tall as a cathedral this is where the crude is separated heated to over 370 degrees Celsius it's pumped into the base of the tower and like steam from a kettle the vapor rises as it cools the molecules condense their heavy asphalt and tar at the bottom while lighter molecules including diesel jet fuel and petrol continue rising until they too condense and can be siphoned off but the trouble with producing all this fuel is they now have an ocean of potentially explosive liquid to deal with but of course it's this explosive quality that makes petrol so useful so to make sure it's as explosive as it should be it's up to workers like Derek Smalley to carefully take samples or analysis in the lab in all every 159 litre barrel of crude produces 73 litres of petrol 35 litres of diesel around 20 litres of jet fuel and heavy fuel oil almost 6 litres of propane and another 34 liters of other products such as butane asphalt and sulfur every day this plant produces enough petrol to fuel a car on 717 round trips to the moon unless of course you drive a 4x4 in which case you may have to fill up halfway anyway Derrick delivers his samples to the lab for testing our lab does the final product check of our product that goes out of the refinery and if it doesn't meet our customers expectation it doesn't go out the gate the fuel is tested by feeding it to a petrol connoisseur and aging but robust NOC testing engine engine knocking happens when fuels spontaneously ignites as it's being compressed in the engine cylinder the reason for this premature ignition is there's too much heptane and not enough octane in the mix by increasing the percentage of octane the mix can be improved until the knocking stops the lab can then feed their data back into the main refinery to correct any mixing errors and ensure a perfect blend with the refineries work done some of her half a million valves are opened and the petrol flows through underground pipelines which feed it to various local terminals like this one in South Houston from here it's transferred to huge tankers for delivery by drivers like Bradley Unruh [Music] but filling up a tanker is way more dangerous than simply filling up your car it can't be dangerous but just made a good cautious alert driver really really really helped the hundreds of liters of volatile cargo mean it's essential Bradley follows stringent safety procedures a mistake while loading or unloading the tank could result in a serious explosion so he takes no chances the metal bodywork can generate sparks from static electricity so first a cord is attached to ground the trailer and also activate the overfill protection probes at the top of each compartment [Music] to cope with the threat of highly flammable vapors escaping a second pipe known as the vapor recovery pipe siphons off any leaks which might otherwise escape into the atmosphere only once these are in place can Bradley connect the fuel lines and begin to pump everyday over 4 million litres of petrol are safely transported to local gas stations from this terminal alone pumped into the service stations huge reservoir the petrol is finally ready for use [Music] so you can at least find solace in the extraordinary work it's taken to keep your wheels turning and next time you fill up your car and grin as' and the cost of your fuel [Music] but until your futuristic flower powered flying car comes along you just have to grin and bear it coming up [Music]

Channel: carltfross

Views: 3,110,951

Rating: 4.6250777 out of 5

Keywords: Crude, oil, Petrol, Gas, Jet, fuel, Plastics, Refinery, Oil, Tankers, Texas, USA

Id: 9Py8-Xy9MKo

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2010