Crude Oil Essay -- Papers

Crude Oil Crude embrocate is a interlocking mixture of hydrocarbon molecules formed over millions of years when the remains of microscopic sea creatures trapped in sediments were converted by heat and pressure into flagrant oil. The most abundant of these mixtures be the ones containing hydrogen and carbon only. These hydrocarbons keep pledge on a numerate of different forms, i.e. alkanes, alkenes and alkynes. They vary in size and shape and viscosity. By manipulating these chains of hydrocarbons you can create any number of useful substances as they are very adaptable. However there are lots of compounds that also contain some of the following oxygen, entropy or nitrogen. The purer hydrocarbon compounds are the most required for these produce a higher temperature when they are destroy which is the primary use for it as it generates an excess amount of expertness when burned and therefore is a useful fuel. The other compounds with sulphur o r nitrogen also have a high energy when burned but they have a negative side-effect as they make sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide when burned and these compounds contribute towards acid rain. Crude oil has to be refined by fractional distillation to separate the short ample hydrocarbon chains from the longer, less useful ones before the compounds can be throw away to good use. Fractional distillation is a technique that relies on the difference in boiling points of the chains of hydrocarbons to separate them. It is so specific that it can separate the substances from each other even when there is only a small amount of difference between the boiling points of the substances. The crude oil is heat... ...ne, which are used to manufacture chemicals. Or the residual from the distillation rear is heated 482C, cooled with gas oil and rapidly burned in a distillation tower. This process reduces the viscosity of heavy weight oils and produces tar. The other order of cracking is called Catalytic Cracking and it uses a catalyst to speed up the cracking reaction. Catalysts include zeolite, aluminium hydrosilicate, and bauxite. The hydrocarbons (only from the oil fraction) are heated in the same way but the catalyst speeds up the reaction by lowering the boiling point of the substance and allowing high molecular intensity alkanes to break into many low molecular mass alkanes and some alkenes. Because the affixation breaking happens randomly, many different forms of the substances are made, i.e. cyclo or branched isomers.