Petroleum products include transportation fuels, fuel oils for heating and electricity generation, asphalt and road oil, and feedstocks for making the chemicals, plastics, and synthetic materials that are in nearly everything we use. Of the approximately 7. One gallon barrel of oil creates The rest over half is used to make things like:. First Name. Last Name.
Ranken Energy Corporation offers direct oil and gas investment opportunities that enable investors to participate in the potential cash flow and the unique tax benefits associated with oil and gas investments.
Investing in oil and gas is highly speculative and could result in substantial losses. I Accept Show Purposes. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice.
Popular Courses. Oil Guide to Investing in Oil Markets. Commodities Oil. What Is an Oil Refinery? Key Takeaways An oil refinery is a facility that takes crude oil and distills it into various useful petroleum products such as gasoline, kerosene or jet fuel. Refining is classified as a downstream operation of the oil and gas industry, although many integrated oil companies will operate both extraction and refining services. Refineries and oil traders look to the crack spread — the relative difference in production cost and market price — of various petroleum products in the derivatives market to hedge their exposure to crude oil prices.
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Compare Accounts. The offers that appear in this table are from partnerships from which Investopedia receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where listings appear. Investopedia does not include all offers available in the marketplace. A crack is a trading strategy that is used in energy futures to establish a refining margin. What Are Downstream Operations? Downstream operations are oil and gas functions that occur after the production phase to the point of sale. Read how downstream companies make money.
What Is Upstream? Upstream refers to the exploration and production stages in the oil and gas industry. Upstream is followed by the midstream and downstream segments. What Is Shale Oil? Shale oil is a type of oil found in shale rock formations that must be hydraulically fractured to extract. Read about the pros and cons of shale oil.
Petroleum Petroleum is a fluid found in the earth that can be refined into fuel and plastics. Read about the types of petroleum, its uses, and environmental impacts. There are multiple versions of the cracking process, and refiners use the process extensively. Cracking is a highly controlled process, so cracking units exist separate from distillation columns. The process of reforming was developed to raise both the quality and volume of gasoline produced by refiners. Using a catalyst again, after a series of reforming processes, substances are converted into aromatics and isomers, which have much higher octane numbers than the paraffins and napthenes produced by other refinery processes.
Most simply, reforming rearranges the naphtha hydrocarbons to create gasoline molecules. Interestingly, hydrogen is also produced by the catalytic reforming process - this hydrogen is then used in other refining processes such as hydrotreating. Crude oil naturally contains contaminants such as sulfur, nitrogen, and heavy metals, which are undesirable in motor fuels.
The treating process, primarily hydrotreating, removes these chemicals by binding them with hydrogen, absorbing them in separate columns, or adding acids to remove them. The recovered molecules are then sold to other industries.
Refineries that process sour crudes produce more sulfur than refineries that process sweet crudes. The last major step of the refining process is blending various streams into finished petroleum products. Refineries blend compound s obtained either from their internal refining process operations as noted above, or externally, to make gasoline that meets specifications for acceptable motor vehicle performance.
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