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Crude oil is a finite resource found in rocks - its non-renewable, and will
run out eventually.
Crude oil is the remains of an ancient biomass consisting mainly of plankton that
was buried in mud and subjected to heat and pressure that slowly end up as a
yellow to brown liquid which may form pools or be absorbed into porous rocks
like shale.
Crude oil is an important raw material, and the source of many useful substances
such as fuels and a chemical feedstock for the petrochemical industry, from
which endless products, including plastics and drugs, are eventually
manufactured, BUT, it is a finite resource, and won't last forever !
Many useful materials on which modern life depends are produced by the
petrochemical industry, such as fuels, solvents, lubricants, polymers, detergents
and host of other specialised chemicals - even drugs for medicinal formulations.
When initially pumped out of the ground crude oil is a complex mixture of a very
large number of compounds most of which are hydrocarbons, molecules
composed of hydrogen and carbon atoms only and many of them are
hydrocarbons called alkanes (a particular series of organic compounds, that
compounds based on carbon - details in other sections).
Examples ...
Full explanation of the structure of the homologous series of alkanes and don't
worry about the ring compounds.
The complex
mixture of
hydrocarbons in
crude oil can be
separated into
fractions by the
technique of
fractional
distillation. The
laboratory
demonstration of
the fractional
distillation is
illustrated on the
right diagram. A
simulated synthetic
crude oil is used
for health and
safety reasons. As
the crude oil
vapour ascends the fractionating column the highest boiling liquid hydrocarbons
condense out and the lowest boiling hydrocarbon liquid's vapour exits the top of
the fractionating column and enters the condenser and runs into the collection
tube. In this way you can distil over progressively higher boiling fractions, which
are themselves narrow boiling point ranges of different hydrocarbons of similar
carbon chain length e.g. C6 to C8 etc. Detailed notes explaining fractional
distillation
Crude oil cannot be used directly but must be refined before commercially useful
products are produced by the petrochemical industry (collectively called
petrochemicals).
The oil refining process principally involves fractional distillation into useful
fractions i.e. products with specific uses, but further processing may needed to
diversify both the quantity and nature of particular oil based products.
Within each fraction obtained from crude oil the hydrocarbon molecules have a
similar number of carbon atoms and similar physical properties.
The uses of the fractions very much depends on their physical properties,
which in turn are dependant on the length of the molecule i.e. the carbon
atom chain in a hydrocarbon molecule.