Crude Oil Refining

A refinery is a factory. A refinery takes a raw material (crude oil) and transforms it into petrol and hundreds of other useful products. A typical large refinery costs billions of pounds to build and millions more to run and upgrade. It runs around the clock 365 days a year, employs  hundreds of people and occupies as much land as several hundred football pitches.
A REFINERY breaks crude oil down into its various components, which then are selectively changed into new products. This process takes place inside a maze of pipes and vessels. The refinery is operated from a highly automated control room.
All refineries perform three basic steps:

• Separation (fractional distillation)
• Conversion (cracking and rearranging the molecules)
• Treatment