Kitchens the Bolivian Way

Oil or petroleum can be used in many, different ways – it could be used to create many different fuel sources such as ethane, diesel, petrol or gasoline, LPG, aviation fuel, kerosene.

Crude oil is actually oil which is not processed. This is a fossil fuel which in simple words means that it has been derived from rotten plants and animals, buried millions of years ago.

One of the reasons why oil cannot be used immediately is that it contains various different hydrocarbons – this needs to be distilled and processed so that the hydrocarbons can be separated and the one specifically needed for various purposes can be used – for instance, gasoline, kerosene, aviation fuel (each has slightly different properties).This process happens in oil refineries (which is why the term refineries is used, from “refining”).

What oil processing equipment does is to use difference in boiling temperatures which is the most common method of refining - this is called fractional distillation .What is involved in this method is separating the different substances into a variety of fractions based on the difference in their boiling temperatures. One needs to vaporize the crude oil first by heating it up and then at the next stage, condensing the vapor.

One of the latest methods is processing different chemicals into others – this process is called conversion. This method of processing chemicals involving breaking longer chains into smaller ones. This allows the conversion of diesel into gasoline in oil refineries.

Another method is that of thermal cracking – here heat and pressure is used to break up heavy hydrocarbons into smaller ones. In this process larger quantities can be created and superiors qualities of gases that are extracted from crude oil.

One more method is that of catalytic cracking which would involve the use of catalysts to break down the petroleum fractions. In this process a larger amount of petrol can be manufactured and also with a higher octane number as compared to the gasoline which is produced using the thermal cracking method. The engineers at the refineries pass the vapor of petroleum through different catalysts such as aluminum and silica mixtures or other types of clay.

One difficulty is that oil refineries, over the last thirty years or so, have not been making sufficient profits and hence have not been too keen in investing in newer oil refining technologies, so as to improve the process of oil refining and the speed, with the result that crude oil process have not risen much since the oil refineries have not been able to process the quantities of crude that is needed the world over, in the shortest possible time.