How to Make Gasoline
Gasoline is a form of refined petroleum that is used primarily as a fuel. Crude oil is pumped from the earth and turned into gasoline and other products like kerosene and benzene. Gasoline is essential to the world's transportation network. The primary fuel of cars, it powers the internal combustion engines that move most vehicles along the planet's highways and byways. Gasoline is highly flammable and must be handled with care.
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Instructions
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To produce gasoline you need to find its ultimate source-- this is crude oil. Crude oil, or petroleum, comes mostly from wells drilled in the earth. While once very common in the US, the largest supplies of crude oil are now found in the Middle East. Crude Oil is moved from the well to the refinery. This may be done either through pipes or in a vehicle such as a tanker truck or tanker ship. Crude oil ranges from the "light sweet" variety to varieties that are heavy and sludgy, almost like asphalt or tar.
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To refine your crude oil into gasoline you will need a rather large facility known as an oil refinery. The traditional process is known as fractional distillation. With fractional distillation, oil--or whatever substance you want to refine-- is boiled in a kind of gigantic hollow tube or column. Different substances have different boiling points. The lower the boiling point the lighter the material. The lighter the material the higher it rises in the giant tube. The petroleum substances that make up gasoline boil at temperatures of anywhere form 40 to as much as 200 degrees Celsius. This means that, in the usual oil refining process, they are the second from the top in the column--just below petroleum gas and just above kerosene.
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To get to the next stage of the process, you siphon off the gasoline-type petroleum from the column. This means that you let it flow into a pipe and collect it in another tank. Most gasoline that we actually use is a blend of different petroleum substances with possibly a few other substances added. High-octane gasoline is produced with the help of a catalytic reformer. The catalytic reformer transforms low-octane gasoline from the fractional distillation process into the high-octane gasoline that meets many engine requirements. The hydrocarbon molecules in gasoline are rearranged to make bigger molecules of "reformulate" that are higher in octane and so burn more cleanly. Different streams of gasoline--or naphtha--are blended together to make just the right mixture.
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To complete the process you will probably have to meet some environmental requirements. These are increasingly strict as because of concerns over global warming and pollution. You will need to remove some foreign substances from your gasoline. These may include sulfur and ethers. Also, other grades of petroleum such as aromatics like benzene are likely to prohibited. Most of these contaminants are highly toxic and tend to damage the environment. Once you get the gasoline to the proper grade and meet all local and national requirements, you have produced a fully-useable substance. You now have fuel for whatever you need.
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Tips & Warnings
Gasoline and related petroleum products are highly combustible. They also emit toxic fumes and should be used only outdoors in in a very well-ventilated area. Avoid breathing the actual fumes or those generated by any engine that burns gasoline. Even fairly small levels of exposure can be fatal in minutes.
