How is gasoline or petrol made from oil?
In: Chemistry
Most things in the part of chemistry called organic ar chains of carbons with or without some extra stuff attached to those chains. Crude oil is one of those chains. Refineries break or join together chains in order to get chains of the proper length.
In order to control how long is your chain of carbons you usually break the natural thing in very short chains, and then those chains go through a process where you chain them together. Usually this is done by controlling the temperature and pressure you “boil” them in. Different combinations of temperature and pressure do different things.
The same kind of processes is also used to make medicine or plastics, also products of organic chemistry.
If you want to learn more you should get accustomed to the fact that not all crude oil is made the same. They are usually separated in groups and are described as sweet/sour and light/heavy.
Crude oil is a mix of a large number of chemicals, just like rum is a mix of water and ethanol and sugar and other stuff, or milk is a mix of water and fat and lactose and other stuff. By distilling the oil–subjecting it to hotter and hotter temperatures to boil off chemicals with different boiling points–we can separate it into kerosene and gasoline and everything else that’s in it.
It’s not really made from oil. It’s part of the oil. Refining oil into gasoline is just removing everything else from the oil that isn’t gasoline.
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