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  • I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive.

    Do they still just burn off that gas?

    by didgetmaster
  • I find it amazing how "naphtha" can mean crude oil, diesel, kerosene, gasoline or kind of white spirit.

    EDIT: oh and it comes from Akkadian! how many Akkadian words do you know?

    by yread
  • The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.
    by t_tsonev
  • As someone with no real-world petrochemistry experience, but much gaming experience, I was very surprised how familiar the crude oil processing diagram looks. Factorio and GregTech are two prime examples of fairly realistic oil processing lines (probably as accurate as any game would reasonably try to be).
    by shhsshs
  • Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact)

    And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...

    by ChristopherDrum
  • Instantly I'm reminded of "That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil"

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572

    https://archive.is/kLFxg

    Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil"

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

    by tolerance
  • My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written
    by diginova
  • About thirty years ago, I was given a personal tour of an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan. I was doing freelance translation then for a Japanese oil company. I mentioned to one of my contacts there that I would be interested in actually seeing the sort of equipment I was translating documents about, and they arranged a visit for me.

    Two things stand out in my memory:

    Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.

    The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.

    by tkgally

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