Why do they burn gas constantly in oil refineries?
In: Engineering
Oil is a mix of different hydrocarbons. Basically, a chain of carbon with oxygen and hydrogen attached to it. Gasoline is one length, bitumen is another, diesel, etc.
Refineries work by basically boiling the oil. Each type of hydrocarbon has different boiling points so they can use this to refine the oil into specific types.
This process results in the useful products and some that are useless. The gas they burn at the top of the towers are basically the hydrocarbons that are too short to be useful (or otherwise not worthwhile to recover) and they need to burn it for safety/environmental reasons.
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