Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 101 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 928 Petroleum refining and processing Global Resources Petroleum fuels. See Gasoline and other petroleum fuels Petroleum refining and processing Category Obtaining and using resources Petroleum is separated into a variety of fuels gasoline kerosene and dieselfuel and into feedstocks for the chemical industr y. Petroleum is first distilled then each of the cuts is further treated or blended to provide the various marketed products. A significant effort is devoted to gasoline production in order to obtain the quantities needed and the desired engine performance. Background Petroleum or crude oil is found in many parts of the world. It is not a chemically pure substance of uniform properties. Rather petroleum is a complex mixture of hundreds of individual chemical compounds that occur in various proportions depending on the source and geological histor y of the particular sample. As a result various kinds of petroleum range in properties and appearance from lightly colored free-flowing liquids to black tarry odiferous materials. It would be impractical to design furnaces or engines capable of efficient reliable operation on a fuel whose characteristics varied so widely. Therefore to provide products of predictable quality to the users petroleum is separated into specific products that through treating blending and purification go on the market as the familiar gasoline kerosene and diesel and heating oils. Some petroleum supplies also contain impurities most notably sulfur compounds that must be removed for environmental reasons. The sequence of separation blending treating and purification operations all make up the processes of petroleum refining. Distillation The first major step in refining petroleum is distillation the separation of components based on boiling point. In principle it would be possible to separate petroleum into each of its component compounds one by one producing many hundreds of individual pure compounds. Doing so would be so laborious that the .
