How can so many useful products be made from crude oil?
Crude oil is found inside the Earth’s crust. Many useful products can be obtained from crude oil by separating the many different substances it contains and by using some of these in chemical reactions to make new substances, for example plastics. KS3 Crude oil is obtained from the Earth’s crust. It was formed from the remains of organisms which lived millions of years ago. It is a fossil fuel. The fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas have resulted from the action of heat and pressure over millions of years, in the absence of air, on material from animals and plants (organic material) which has been covered by layers of sedimentary rock. FT and HT Crude oil is a mixture of a very large number of compounds. A mixture consists of two or more elements or compounds not chemically combined together. The chemical properties of each substance in the mixture are unchanged. This makes it possible to separate the substances in a mixture by physical methods including distillation. Most of the c
