Oil Refinery
Refinery is a factory. A refinery takes a raw material (crude oil) and
transforms it into petrol and hundreds of other useful products. A typical
large refinery costs billions of pounds to build and millions more to run and
upgrade. It runs around the clock 365 days a year, employs hundreds of people
and occupies as much land as several hundred football feilds.
A REFINERY breaks crude oil down into its various components, which then are
selectively changed into new products. This process takes place inside a maze
of pipes and vessels. The refinery is operated from a highly automated control
room.
All refineries perform three basic steps:
- Separation (fractional distillation)
- Conversion (cracking and rearranging the molecules)
- Treatment
