5.C.4. Transporting and Refining Oil

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来自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的课程

Planet Earth...and You!

28 个评分

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Planet Earth...and You!

28 个评分

Earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building, ice ages, landslides, floods, life evolution, plate motions—all of these phenomena have interacted over the vast expanses of deep time to sculpt the dynamic planet that we live on today. Planet Earth presents an overview of several aspects of our home, from a geological perspective. We begin with earthquakes—what they are, what causes them, what effects they have, and what we can do about them. We will emphasize that plate tectonics—the grand unifying theory of geology—explains how the map of our planet's surface has changed radically over geologic time, and why present-day geologic activity—including a variety of devastating natural disasters such as earthquakes—occur where they do. We consider volcanoes, types of eruptions, and typical rocks found there. Finally, we will delve into the processes that produce the energy and mineral resources that modern society depends on, to help understand the context of the environment and sustainability challenges that we will face in the future.

从本节课中

Week 5: Energy Resources

The video lectures for this week cover various aspects of energy usage by modern civilization, especially our utilization of fossil fuels. The Week 5 Lab sends you on a Google Earth tour of energy-producing sites around the world, places where both conventional and alternative forms of energy are being generated. The Week 5 Assignment gives you a chance to survey your own personal use of energy – where does it come from and how much do you use – and then to share the information with others in the class. During the Week 5 Discussion, you will consider the implications of how society uses the energy of fossil fuels and the implications for the local environment and global climate.

5.C.1. Formation of Hydrocarbons: Oil and Gas7:44

5.C.2. Conventional vs. Non-Conventional Hydrocarbons: Conventional Reserves9:57

5.C.3. Exploring and Drilling for Oil9:02

5.C.4. Transporting and Refining Oil4:52

5.C.5. Where Does Oil Occur, and Why?6:33

与讲师见面

Dr. Stephen Marshak
Professor and Director of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment
Department of Geology
Dr. Eileen Herrstrom
Lecturer
Geology

[MUSIC]

So once the oil's been taken out of the ground, what happens to it next?

Well, there are two things that have to happen.

First of all, the oil has to be transported to where it can be used.

And second of all, it has to be refined or turned into products that are usable for

different purposes.

So how does oil get carried from the oil field to the refinery?

Two principle ways.

First of all, there are pipelines.

Now, you're familiar with pipelines perhaps in households.

You're familiar with pipelines in cities.

Oil pipelines tend to be a bit bigger.

Diameter is maybe like that, to maybe like that they can be quite large, and

also they have to in some cases go great distances.

So you may see pipelines that are tens,

hundreds or in some cases even thousands of kilometers long.

Now, to put these pipelines in, is an extremely expensive proposition, and

sometimes requires digging a huge ditch.

Sometimes requires obtaining permission for land use rights for a large area.

In any case, pipelines are usually installed either underground or

in some cases on the surface.

Here we see an example of a pipeline being installed underground.

Notice that a large swath of land has to be cleared in order for

it to be put in, and that that land can be reclaimed afterwards.

Usually the pipeline companies will avoid allowing trees to grow over the pipeline,

so that they have access to it in case there's a break or rupture later on.

I mentioned that some pipelines are above ground.

Perhaps the best known example of such pipeline is the TransAlaska pipeline.

Which runs from the North slope of Alaska,

the Arctic Ocean shore to the South shore of Alaska.

A distance of about 800 kilometers or more.

Now this pipeline has to be above ground,

because most of the terrain it crosses is permafrost, permanently frozen ground.

And in order for

the oil to be able to flow it has to be warm, otherwise it would be too viscous.

So if you just had the pipeline underground in a typical ditch,

it would melt its way into the sub-surface and would probably get broken.

So the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was a special engineering task that led to

the production of a pipeline, that not only is above ground to

avoid melting permafrost, but also crosses several active fault zones.

And had to be able to accommodate the displacements associated with significant

earthquakes.

The pipeline networks in various parts of the industrialized world

are really quite extensive.

Heres a map of the United States that shows

thousands upon thousands of kilometers of pipelines crisscrossing the country.

Needless to say, many of them emanate from the oil rich portions of the country,

such as Texas.

Here's also a map of pipelines across Europe and

a map of some of the pipelines in Western Asia.

Now, pipelines of course are not the only way to get oil to market.

In particularly, in the case of middle Eastern oil

which is very far from where it's consumed in some cases.

It's been necessary to build tankers.

Ships that carry oil across the sea.

Some of these tankers are absolutely immense, and

have come to be known as super tankers.

One of the largest, it can carry about 3 million barrels of oil,

where a barrel is about 42 gallons.

That makes this ship weigh on the order of 440,000 tons,

ten times the size of the legendary Titanic.

Once the oil has been brought into shore, it will be piped into large storage tanks,

and from there taken to a refinery.

A refinery is simply a place where the hydrocarbon molecules that are in crude

oil, meaning the oil that's taken directly from the ground are cracked to form

hydrocarbons of the right molecular length to serve specific purposes.

Typically, the refining process takes place in a distillation column.

In such a column, the crude oil is heated and it begins to undergo

cracking reactions, breaking the larger molecules into smaller ones.

The larger molecules stay near the bottom of its distillation column, and

the lighter ones gradually migrate towards the top, because they have lower density.

There are various spigots, so to speak,

coming out of the sides of the distillation column,

that allow the refiners to select whatever product that they want at any given time.

So you can produce heavy oils at the bottom, some of which are used for

the plastics and light natural gas, up at the top with gasoline, kerosene, and

other substances in between.

[MUSIC]

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