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Asked by anon-292511 to Steve on 4 May 2021.
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Steve Briddon answered on 27 Apr 2021:
This is not my area of knowledge at all – but crude oil is the oil as it comes out of the ground. Oil is made of lots of dead organisms from millions of years ago which have been compressed by rocks etc. – so it has lots of carbon in it. We can process the crude oil by separating it out into its different components to use for things like petrol, diesel, plastics etc.
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Comments
Rosie commented on :
Hi! What Steve said is true! It’s not my area either, but I remember learning at school the way we separate out crude oil is by a process called “fractional distillation” where the crude oil is feed into a long container that is heated at the bottom. The system is designed so that the smaller molecules rise to the top: https://blog.enerpac.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/fractionating-column-diagram.pdf