What is an oil refinery?
An oil refinery is a place where the heavy crude oil which is taken out of the ground is turned into useful products. Oil, as it comes out of the ground, is not terribly useful but, under extreme heat, through a process called cracking where other chemicals and materials are added to the oil (to facilitate this cracking process), you end up with the lighter fluids that we’re more familiar with at the gasoline pump; that kind of clear to golden looking liquid that we call gasoline certainly doesn’t look anything like the heavy, black oil that comes out of the ground. So, it’s the refinery that turns the oil from one into the other. It also creates other products like kerosene and wax that we use and the materials that go into plastics.
