Last Update: July 10, 2015

  1. Fossil Fuel’s gift to the world – modern society, powerful machines, 7+ billion people
  2. How many days of human labor is in a gallon of gasoline?
  3. What’s in Crude Oil? A lotta toxic stuff, Benzene, Tuolene, etc
  4. Health effects of fossil fuel consumption
    1. Health effects of burning Diesel, and the exhaust fumes
    2. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, asthma, from living near diesel exhaust concentrations
  5. Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, Peak Resources, Peak Everything
    1. What happens when the power runs out? That is, when Peak Oil really bites us in the butt?
    2. Fracking's false oil-energy boom leading the world to financial collapse?
    3. Peak Oil 101 – Chris Martenson
    4. Peak Oil Reading List
    5. DON’T WORRY, DRIVE ON: Fossil Fools & Fracking Lies
    6. 300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds
    7. U.S. Military rethinking its energy policies; speech by Adm. Mullin at the Energy Security Forum of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
    8. Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a post-Petroleum era
  6. The oil companies keep winning as long as we keep giving them money
  7. Natural Gas – the Supposedly Clean Fossil Fuel
  8. Gasoline and Diesel
    1. What is the true price of gasoline? Should it cost $10 per gallon?
    2. Types of Crude Oil sources & constraints
    3. Extracting Crude Oil from the ground
    4. Transporting crude oil to refineries
    5. Refining crude oil to oil products
    6. Delivery to consumers
    7. Oil Products Consumption – burning gasoline, etc
    8. Crude Oil Dispersants – The main tool to mitigate crude oil spill disasters
  9. Coal
    1. Types of Coal
    2. Clean coal? Misnomer?
    3. Coal as a source of electricity or conversion into synthetic crude oil
    4. History of Coal Use
  10. Fracking – Hydraulic Fracturing – Acidizing
    1. Produced Water from Fracking operations
    2. Fracking (waste water injection) probably causes induced earthquakes
    3. Hydraulic Fracturing (fracturare hidraulica) in Romania’s shale gas (gaze de sist) formations
      1. Public perception of shale gas in Romania
      2. The future of shale gas in Romania: questions and policy options
      3. Romania after Nabucco: Energy Security Options
      4. Romania’s Oil and Gas Framework: 2013 highlights
      5. Paleozoic Paleozoic Shale Gas Plays of the Eastern Europe: Romania case study
    4. United States State Department Bureau of Energy Resources – USAID
      1. Fiscal Year 2014 USAID Budget Request contains funding for fracking program
    5. Marathon Oil explains that Hydraulic Fracturing is safe and beneficial
    6. WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth
    7. Truth about Fracking – Wes Wilson – Phil Doe
    8. Costs of Fracking for Oil and Gas

Oil refineries are big places, which do the complex chemical engineering required to convert crude oil into the various oil products. As we said above, crude oil contains a huge variety of chemicals. What petroleum scientists found in the 1800's is that using distillation techniques, heating the crude oil making it into a vapor then extracting different layers of the vapor, that different valuable products could be extracted.

A huge huge variety of products are now made this way.  [Wikipedia1]

"Usesofpetroleum" by AniRaptor2001 - Own work, from 2007 Energy Information Administration data, average April 2006 to March 2007 refinery products: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_pct_dc_nus_pct_m.htm. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usesofpetroleum.png#mediaviewer/File:Usesofpetroleum.png

For example -- all the asphalt roads we drive on? A lot (but not all) of that is made from the Asphaltene's in crude oil.  [Wikipedia2]

However the primary products from crude oil is are fuels like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

Another factoid to note is that oil refinery operators make sure to put every ounce of crude oil to some use or another. It means that every ounce of the toxicity leaving the oil well does get distributed somewhere in the ecosphere. While we get alarmed at oil spills and the release of toxic chemicals all concentrated in one place, the truth is that every day all day long we're collectively releasing the same chemicals into the ecosphere. In the form of all the oil products we consume every day all day long.

Some of the chemicals derived from crude oil at refineries are directly used in the refining process, such as hydrogen used for hydrocracking and hydrodesulfurization, or petroleum coke that's burned to provide heat at some refineries.

Our friends at ExxonMobil put this outline of the refining process into a presentation.  [ExxonMobil]

Okay, yes, the processes involved require big chemical factories, and produce a dizzying array of useful products that have made our modern society possible. What about the environmental impact at the refinery?  [Wikipedia2]

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
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