Quote:
Originally Posted by Z-man
Um - no motor oil is crude oil. If you can find me a car that uses crude oil, I will buy it -- and not have to worry about all that oil refinery stuff...
-Z
|
Most lubricating oils are based on parrafin or napthalene.
Which are components of crude oil.
So ya take the crude oil, clean the sand and salts and water and nitrogens out of it, and heat it up. Say 550 degrees.
Then stick it in a distillation tower. A big tall tower with condensing trays and pressure and temperature controls through reflux pumps etc.
And ya strip the light ends off the top, hydrgen, butanes, propanes, etc.
And ya take the heavy ends off the bottoms, the asphaltines, resins, tars.
And ya strip off the middle two cuts, straight run light gas oil and heavy gas oil, or ya could refine the cuts more iffn you wanted to and if your technology allowed.
Then ya refine those cuts some more in different process units, heating and distilling until the purity rises. And ya can run the same product through the same process more than once if you really need to get the purity up.
All the time tuning the process to optimize a certain type of desirable molecule while limiting the undesirable molecules.
Kinda like running moonshine therough the still over and over and over. The purity goes up as the impurities are distilled out.
Oh BTW, you'll never get all of them out. Every distillation run will contain a small percentage of impurities. You can still it all day long but there will still be some there.
Think Dichotomy paradox.
Eventually you get 99.99% of what you want, and call it good.
Or ........ you could devise a way to create specific molecules in a controlled environment like a lab, a way that could tightly control what types of molecules are created and which are not.
That could end up reaching a much higher level on purity that from refining.
But as has already been said, big hooey. What difference does it make?
Except in the size of the wallet i mean.
Hydrocracking us where you take long chain type molecules and you heat them up to about 900 degrees, and pressurize them to about 2000 psig, and inject them with hydrogen and send it all through a series of very large reactors (usually 3) that break or crack the longer molecule into shorter, more desirable molecules.
Like heavy gas oils into diesel or gasoline components.