About This Lesson
Are you ready to refine that black gunk into gasoline? First, we need to do some cleaning. Because crude oil was deposited in and migrated through sedimentary rocks, it also contains various impurities that it picked up along the way over millions of years. So the refinery uses a combination of gravity and an electric grid to remove much of the corrosive salts, water and the solids that can foul their refinery equipment. The electric grid uses the polarity of the water molecules to make them coalesce and drop them out of solution. Cool trick, huh? Now it’s time to heat things up.
