Definition
Oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where crude oil is transformed and refined into more useful products such as petroleum naphtha, gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt base, heating oil, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas, jet fuel and fuel oils. Petrochemicals feed stock like ethylene and propylene can also be produced directly by cracking crude oil without the need of using refined products of crude oil such as naphtha.
Oil Refinery
What is ‘Oil Refinery’
An industrial plant that refines crude oil into petroleum products such as diesel, gasoline and heating oils. Oil refineries essentially serve as the second stage in the production process following the actual extraction by oil rigs. The first step in the refining process is distillation where crude oil is heated at extreme temperatures to separate the different hydrocarbons.
Explaining ‘Oil Refinery’
The crude oil components, once separated can be sold to different industries for a broad range of purposes. Lubricants can be sold to industrial plants immediately after distillation, but other products require more refining before reaching the final user. Major refineries have the capacity to process hundreds of thousand barrels of crude oil a day.
Further Reading
- Project risk management using multiple criteria decision-making technique and decision tree analysis: a case study of Indian oil refinery – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- Relationships among US oil prices and oil industry equity indices – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Environmental regulation and productivity: evidence from oil refineries – www.mitpressjournals.org [PDF]
- Real options and interactions with financial flexibility – www.jstor.org [PDF]
- Risk factors in stock returns of Canadian oil and gas companies – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Oil price shocks and industry stock returns – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Common and fundamental factors in stock returns of Canadian oil and gas companies – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Oil price dynamics: A behavioral finance approach with heterogeneous agents – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
