I’ve read that gasoline was known for years as a by product of the kerosene distillation process but originally too volatile to be used. Eventually someone came along and figured we could use it and we know what happened after that.
So my question is, during the distillation process do we go ahead and continue distilling crude the same way we did to make kerosene with the goal of obtaining gasoline?
In: Chemistry
We distill crude oil into a variety of things. The process produces a whole bunch of products. Which one is the “byproduct” is really just a matter of opinion (or a point of economic speculation based on which fraction of the crude oil has the highest profit margin).
Either way, the actual distillation tower doesn’t ‘see’ a difference. It just separates the crude oil out based on boiling temperatures into several different substances.
So, there are a lot of misconceptions about how we get Oil products from the ground. We all think of the image of black liquid popping up from a spot in the ground, and then we just heat it, it becomes gas, and we’re done.
But what Oil Extracting, Mining, fracking, etc. get from the ground is something called “Crude”. Crude, rather than being one substance, is actually a super viscous mixture of many different fuel sources, all with different properties. It’s messy and super inconsistent from place to place.
So we take the fuel to a refinery, and heat it a lot. This is because all of the different “things” in the crude boil at different temperatures. So in this way, we split the crude into many different fuels.
So to say Kerosene is a “by product” of gasoline is really a half truth, as they both come from Crude as a common origin. FYI, in addition to Gasoline and Kerosene, this same process gives us stuff like Butane, Propane, and other more gaseous fuels.
That’s true, back in the early days of oil drilling and refining, kerosene was the product they were refining for, gasoline was considered a waste product, and often dumped in rivers and lakes just to get rid of it, until methods were developed to harness it’s explosive tendencies, the best example, most vehicle engines are run today, by injecting explosive gasoline vapors/mists into the piston chambers of cars trucks and buses, a spark plug, and a few other methods ignite the gasoline vapors exploding the gas, pushing all those pistons up and down, turning a crank shaft in circles round and round, attached to the transmission, and then to the drive shaft of your car which then which then turns a series of gears, turning you axle/s round and around very fast, along with the tires/wheels attached to the ends of the axles, and off down the road you go.
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