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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.

Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make.

I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.

Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.
The odor point is interesting. I think a lot of people mentally picture refineries as visibly dirty and smelly by default, but a plant near dense urban/residential areas probably has very strong incentives to be almost boringly well-contained
Impressive. I had to perform a site survey at a refinery for an engineering firm I worked for in the US. It was situated outside of a poor/working class, predominantly minority town. The smell hit us in the car as we got off the interstate. The windows were rolled up and the A/C was blasting (it was the middle of summer). The air was hazy miles from the plant and stank of petroleum. It looked like a dystopian video game with a sepia-toned filter over what felt like a deserted town. The noises on site went from bad to horrific (with signage indicating permanent hearing damage if you spent any time in the area for more than a minute to traverse the space while wearing earplugs and headphones). And the suddenly sweet smell of benzene from the (apparently broken for a number of undisclosed years) recovery system when the wind shifted.
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
It’s worth mentioning here - the founder (Dhiru bhai) of Reliance used to pump gas in Dubai and that’s where he got the dream to start his own refinery one day. Dream one side, but just going about setting up such a giant production facility at an enormous scale is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Pretty sure he had overflow of grit, commitment, and all around strength, and of course high dose of highest level of talent.
My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.
Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.

It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.

What a massive shift in just 25 years.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...

Wow, I had seen the inside of the refinery still partly under construction way back in 2003 when I was barely out of my teens.
That must be an incredible place to grow up around
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...

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...

Reminds me of the shareware nuclear power plant sims built for a similar purpose I used to play.
If we're playing games, SpaceChem was one of the coolest games I've ever played.
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).
I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
Factory games are weirdly good at teaching the "shape" of these systems
ABSOLUTELY first thing that popped into my head, too.

Fantastic read.

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.
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials.

I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.

> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat.

I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.

Is this accurate?

Most of any fuel used for motive power ends up as waste heat simply due to the inherent (in)efficiencies of the Carnot cycle: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle>.

Where liquid hydrocarbons (not necessarily petroleum, but also biofuels and synfuels) have clear wins are:

- Overall energy density. By both mass and volume, little short of nuclear power exceeds this. Battery storage is roughly 1/10th the density of liquid hydrocarbons by mass.

- Handling ease. Liquid hydrocarbons, particularly kerosene (jet aviation fuel), diesel, and fuel oil are quite mild-mannered. Even the rather more rambunctious petrol is safe enough for ordinary civilians to dispense, store, and handle, for the most part. Liquid hydrocarbons can be stored at ambient conditions in simple containers, are largely non-toxic, and can be piped or flowed readily between locations.

- Storage stability. There are very few energy options which are as stable in storage for days to years or more.

- Ease of utilisation. Electric motors are arguably simpler, but other options, including direct (as in on-board) nuclear are not. Again, untrained civilians can use small to large internal combustion engines readily.

In particular, there are usage modes, most notably air, marine, and mobile / remote-location applications, where liquid fuels are quite difficult to substitute for. Ground-based and inland-waterway transport can be electrified, but long-distance freight and passenger travel whether by sea or air not so much. Efficiency considerations pale next to the handling and utilisation characteristics.

I'm not defending fossil fuels, and again the arguments apply equally to liquid hydrocarbons of any origin. But given the properties, prevalence, and low cost (however illusory that may be) of petroleum-derived hydrocarbon fuels, they're not trivially substituted for in all applications.

Primary energy comparisons can make fossil fuels look more "irreplaceable" than they are, because so much of the input energy is lost as heat before it becomes useful work
It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.
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?

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?

The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products.

It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.

Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.

If you're interested in how the oil industry as a whole operates and why, Oil 101 is an interesting read.
This doesn't explain anything, but it's a drive-around tour of a now-demolished refinery in Lockport IL in 1989 that operated for 80 years. It's also interesting because it's vintage VHS footage with a quirky French soundtrack. To me it scratches the itch of found footage and backrooms (sorta), plus shows just how massive these operations are.

https://youtu.be/QAkzUAM_ylA?si=VPQuoe7qM_XbbCTh

This is a really good overview of oil refining. I'll add a few things.

1. The light and heavy distinction is covered by a measure called API gravity [1]. The higher the API gravity, the lighter the crude;

2. Refiners mix different crude types depending on what kind of refined products they want to produce;

3. Heavy crude tends to be less valuable although it's essential for some applications. Lighter crude produces generally more valuable products like gasoline, diesel and avgas. But heavy crude goes into construction (eg roads) and fuel for ships (ie bunkers));

4. Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting. They don't need to be this way. A new refiner would produce vastly less pollution but they're almost impossible to get permission to build now. One exception is the Southern Rock refinery currently being built in Oklahoma [2], which will be powered by largely renewable energy and produce a lot less emissions than an equivalent older refinery with the same capacity;

5. There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;

6. California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth.

The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason; and

7. California doesn't build pipelines so is entirely dependent on seaborne oil imports (~75%) despite the US being a net energy exporter. Last I checked, ~20% of that foreign oil comes through the Strait (from Iraq, mostly) so, interestingly, CA is more vulnerable to the Strait of Hormuz closure than the rest of the country.

I guess I'll add a disclaimer: I'm very much pro-renewables, particular solar. I think solar is the future. But we currently live in a world that has huge demand for oil and no alternatives for many of those uses (eg diesel, plastics, construction, industrial, avgas) so we should at least be smart about how we go forward.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity

[2]: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/05/24/5-6-billion-...

> an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas

What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?

There is a cool game that someone posted a while ago about this https://hnarcade.com/games/games/refinery-simulator
Good read. Just sadly all temperature measurements are in Fahrenheit. Really makes it hard to grasp for the other 99% of the world
Crikey we have got so far to go with energy production.

Thankfully, the top consumer China, is building nuclear reactors at an unfathomable rate.

NO₂ column density over the Jamnagar refinery mentioned in the article: https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8....
if you liked this and the history of the industry, "The Prize" is a fantastic read!
The whole idea of processing gain blows my mind that more volume comes out than goes in.

Also the fact that that oil is different colors (green, red, etc) and not black is always amusing.

What always strikes me about refineries is how "simple" some of the core ideas are in isolation
Sadly more examples of how an oil refinery not works lately
What is its weakest link, from a defense point of view?
Cool to see how when people talk about “transitioning off oil” it's more than replacing gasoline in cars. It's replacing this entire global machine.
* Ukraine has entered the chat *
We have to urgently stop doing this of course, to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Wars are peanuts compared to the death toll.