Around 800 million Vehicles use about 7 billion liters of fuel daily. Keeping gas stations worldwide filled with this flammable liquid is an incredibly complex and potentially dangerous task, but have you ever wondered how gasoline is made? The oil industry in the United States Texas to discover how gasoline is produced from crude oil. This is one of the most influential places globally. The US oil industry is located in Texas, where drilling has been taking place since 1894, but it wasn’t until 1901 that the oil industry took off, with one extraction company tripling our oil production overnight.
Since then, nearly 60 billion barrels of oil have been extracted from Texas, and if oil companies have calculated correctly, there’s a reserve of about 10 billion barrels that have yet to be extracted. Crude oil isn’t just the primary fuel for vehicles. It also provides 50% of the energy we need.
Petrochemical derivatives are essential for everyday products such as plastic, tarmac, tires, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. This sticky, smelly black liquid is crude oil, the primary raw material for gasoline production. Crude oil is buried deep within the Earth.
Millions of years ago, plants, animals, organisms, and tiny creatures died falling onto seabeds and buried under the sediment over centuries. This organic material underwent chemical transformation due to heat and pressure approximately 250 million years later, and it has become one of the world’s most crucial energy sources. This is Texas’s Black Gold, the finest on this hot and humid morning. The team is starting its work, which involves drilling a new well every month.
Over 2,000 new wells are dug in Texas each month, extracting over 900,000 th000 barrels of crude oil daily to keep the crude oil flowing. Producers like Occidental Petroleum Corporation drill an average of one new well daily, after identifying potential oil and natural gas reservoirs beneath the ground using seismic technology. The drilling site is selected. Although this technology helps to an extent, oil exploration is still a gamble. If the well is productive, the crude oil goes to the refinery, where it’s modified to make gasoline, diesel aviation fuel, and other products.
However, finding oil and extracting it from the ground is only half the challenge. They also have to reach the oil in this area known as the thermal Basin. Crude oil is located at a depth of up to 4,000 meters, trapped within 542 million years.
For access to this oil, enormous engines are used to drive a diamond-tipped drill bit into the ground; however, the friction generates tremendous heat, so water is continuously pumped Under pressure to cool The Cutting head. The water then carries the debris to the surface as mud. It’s noisy and highly hazardous work. The drill’s pressure must be just right, too little, and it will only cut a little, or it will break. Also, while drilling, there’s a risk of gas emissions that could lead to catastrophic explosions. While drilling, the team must constantly add drill pipe sections using a 5-ton automatic dual wrench.
As the drill bores its way at a rate of 5 meters per hour, this demanding task must be repeated every couple of hours, 24 hours a day. If luck is on their side, they’ll strike oil. Initially, the pressure of the trapped oil causes it to flow through small holes into the pipe and up to the surface. Still, this natural pressure doesn’t last forever, so to keep the oil flowing, a plunger pump is used to maintain the flow for deep wells. The circular motion of the engine’s flywheel is converted into vertical motion, which acts like a massive metal syringe drawing oil to the surface.
The fluid from each well exits through a pipe, and the pipes from all the wells feed into a main line that leads to a gas removal container. The fluid contains carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and natural gas, all of which must be extracted. These pumps are used to collect Texas’s Black Gold, but these oil fields are far from where the oil is needed, so a series of pumps push the oil into a pipeline for a journey of 1,000 km to its destination.
This is the largest oil refinery in the US, with over 8,000 km of metal pipelines covering 10 square km. This plant can refine over 562,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The noise is so loud that the plant’s 4,000 workers use over 1 million ear protectors yearly. This place is so massive that it not only processes crude oil in Texas but also refines oil worldwide.
Crude oil contains a mix of hydrocarbons, each with a different number of carbon atoms. These hydrocarbons have different weights. Propane is the lightest, while the heaviest is used for tarmac. The team removes and treats hydrogen sulfide, converting it into sulfur, which a local farm buys and uses as fertilizer.
After heating the crude oil to over 370°, it’s pumped into the base of a tower, where it rises as Vapor, similar to Boiling Water. Upon cooling, the molecules condense, and the heaviest molecules settle at the bottom. Lighter molecules, such as gasoline and kerosene, continue Rising until they also condense and can be extracted via a siphon from every 191 barrels of crude, 88 L of gasoline and 48 L of diesel, about 26 L of kerosene nearly 7 L of propane and 32 L of other products like lubricants and Plastics are extracted this plant produces enough gasoline for a car to travel to the Moon and back 770 times.
The fuel is tested in an old engine that assesses its knocking resistance. An engine knocks when the fuel spontaneously ignites upon engine cylinder compression. Then, the lab can provide the data back to the refinery to correct errors and ensure Perfection.
It’s time to open some valves to let the gasoline flow through underground pipes to nearby terminals. From there, it goes into huge tanker trucks; filling a tanker truck is riskier than filling a car’s gas tank. A mistake while loading or unloading the truck could result in a serious explosion. The metal body can generate Sparks due to static electricity, so the first step is to ground the truck with a cable and activate protection sensors against overfilling.
A second pipe, known as a vapor recovery pipe, absorbs emitted Vapors to prevent them from dispersing into the atmosphere. About 4 million liters of gasoline are transported to gas stations every day. After pouring the gasoline into large tanks, it’s ready for consumption. The next time you fill up your tank and think about the High fuel costs, take a moment to acknowledge the sweat and toil of the laborers and oil producers who make it all happen.