An
Oil Refinery Company is that type of a company which is involved in processing and refining of crude oil or petroleum. For this purpose, it uses an oil refinery. The products obtained by this process include kerosene, gasoline, asphalt base, diesel fuel, LPG or liquefied petroleum gas, and heating oil.
An oil refinery is basically a type of industrial operation plant which is used to process and refine petroleum or crude oil into more valuable crude oil products. Oil refineries are built as big industrial compounds and they have a large number of pipelines for transporting fluid streams towards chemical processing units.
Oil refining is basically a downstream operation of the petroleum industry. The downstream operation of crude oil business also deals with transportation and distribution of crude oil products. The transportation is carried out with the help of pipeline transport and tankers. Oil refinery companies then sell the different products derived from crude oil such as LPG, jet fuel, gasoline, diesel oil, as well as natural gas.
The principal products of oil refineries can be categorized into the following types:
- Asphalt
- Paraffin wax
- Diesel fuel
- Naphtha
- Fuel oils
- Gasoline
- Kerosene and associated jet aircraft fuels
- Liquid petroleum gas (LPG)
- Lubricating oils
- Tar
Usually, the majority of products produced as the result of crude oil refining are categorized into the following three types :
Light distillates, for example naptha, gasoline, and LPG
Middle distillates, for example, diesel and kerosene
Heavy distillates and residuum such as wax, lubricants, fuel oil, and tar
The categorization is done according to the manner in which the distillation and separation of crude oil into fractions (known as distillates and residuum) is done.
The specialty end products of petroleum or crude oil include the following:
- Propane
- Lubricants which are used for manufacturing greases, machine oils, motor oils etc.
- Wax or paraffin
- Sulfur or Sulfuric acid
- Tar
- Petroleum coke
- Petrochemicals
The leading oil refinery companies of the world include the following:
- Valero Energy Corporation
- Frontier Oil Corporation
- ExxonMobil
- Reliance
- SK Corporation
- GS Caltex
- Hovensa LLC
- Petroleos de Venezuela
- S-Oil
- Shell Eastern
- Royal Dutch Shell
- Saudi Aramco