How Does a Refinery Work?
Chevron's Burnaby Refinery
Inside a maze of silver towers and pipes is a fascinating factory that changes hydrocarbon molecules to make gasoline and other transportation fuels.
A refinery is a factory. Just as a paper mill turns lumber into paper products or a glassworks turns silica into stemware, a refinery takes a raw material – crude oil – and transforms it into gasoline and many other useful products.
A typical large refinery costs billions of dollars to build and millions more to maintain and upgrade. It runs around the clock 365 days a year, employs hundreds of people and occupies as much land as several hundred football fields. It’s so big and sprawling, in fact, that workers ride bicycles from one station to another.
Chevron has refining capacities worldwide of over two million barrels per day. Chevron’s North American refining network includes five gasoline-producing “Factories” in the United States and another in Burnaby, B.C. British Columbia, Canada.
These world class operations had surprisingly humble origins. In 1876, company pioneers used wagons and mules to haul two primitive stills to a spot near Pico Canyon, Calif., the site of California’s first producing oil wells. The stills, each about the size of a garage, were used to heat oil at the prodigious rate of 25 to 40 barrels a day. This “oil boiling” produced kerosene, lubricants, waxes and gasoline – a clear, lightweight liquid that generally was discarded as a useless byproduct.
Gasoline’s lowly status rose quickly after 1892, when Charles Duryea built the first U.S. gas-powered automobile. From then on, the light stuff from crude oil became the right stuff.
Today, some refineries can turn more than half of every 42-gallon barrel of crude oil into gasoline. That’s a remarkable technological improvement from 70 years ago, when only 11 gallons of gasoline could be produced. How does this transformation take place? Essentially, refining breaks crude oil down into its various components, which then are selectively reconfigured into new products.
This process takes place inside a maze of hardware that one observer has likened to “a metal spaghetti factory.” Employees regulate refinery operations from within highly automated control rooms. Because so much activity happens out of sight, refineries are surprisingly quiet places. The only sound most visitors hear is the constant, low hum of heavy equipment.
The complexity of this equipment varies from one refinery to the next. In general, the more sophisticated a refinery, the better its ability to upgrade crude oil into high-value products. Whether simple or complex, however, all refineries perform three basic steps: separation, conversion and treatment.