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tkgally
jyounker
Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make.
I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.
pjc50
Where I live there's been a long running saga around flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt
When it's lit at night you can see it from up to twenty miles away. Closer in you can hear it. Things have gone back and forwards on mitigations, fines, industrial disputes, and in the end the plant is closing.
consumer451
I have a basic understanding of the economics behind flaring, but from the outside it seems like such a waste of energy & hydrocarbons!
tgsovlerkhgsel
Likewise, a lot of the complaints people have about data centers are engineering choices. If companies can get away with it, they'll do it the cheap way.
pfdietz
What could be needed is internalization of external costs. If you release chemicals that cause problems, charge the polluter, and send the charges to those affected.
On a global scale this breaks down, because governments value the lives of non-citizens orders of magnitude below the lives of their own citizens. The US will spend millions to save one expected life at home; it will avoid spending thousands to save one expected life in a third world country.
hyraki
Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.
diginova
My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written
mandeepj
It’s worth mentioning here - the founder (Dhiru bhai) of Reliance used to pump gas in Dubai and that’s where he got the dream to start his own refinery one day. Dream one side, but just going about setting up such a giant production facility at an enormous scale is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Pretty sure he had overflow of grit, commitment, and all around strength, and of course high dose of highest level of talent.
Gud
Any source for this claim that Ambani started his career as a gas pumper? Or are do you mean someone else?
damnitbuilds
Nah, he did it the old-fashioned way - by corruption and dirty dealing, then his family suppressed the people reporting the truth:
spot5010
My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.
throwaway7783
Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.
alephnerd
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.
It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.
What a massive shift in just 25 years.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...
caminante
Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity.
> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain
You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.
alephnerd
Tech bros who don't know the industries they talk about should honestly STFU. It's the one annoying thing about HN. Y'all feel you need to talk but aren't actually contributing anything of value to the conversation.
Rebuilding refinery capacity within the US is hard, especially given that a net new refinery hasn't been built in the US in 50 years.
Honestly if YC agrees to delete my comments I'd be glad to leave this forum. Host HNers just aren't worth dealing with at this point.
mlinhares
When all you can produce are finance bros this is the result.
tolerance
Instantly I'm reminded of "That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761572
Which leads to "Planet Money Buys Oil"
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...
ChristopherDrum
Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact)
And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...
EdwardDiego
Reminds me of the shareware nuclear power plant sims built for a similar purpose I used to play.
shhsshs
As someone with no real-world petrochemistry experience, but much gaming experience, I was very surprised how familiar the crude oil processing diagram looks. Factorio and GregTech are two prime examples of fairly realistic oil processing lines (probably as accurate as any game would reasonably try to be).
FumblingBear
I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.
triceratops
All the more reason to save fossil fuels instead of burning them for energy.
protocolture
>triceratops
Hurry up and become crude oil.
t_tsonev
The article is quick to point out the huge role of oil in the modern energy mix. It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat. The so called "Primary energy fallacy". Other than that, it's a great read.
nerdsniper
To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials.
I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.
whatever1
We can always make polymers and HydroCarbons in general from other sources if we have energy abundance. We literally can just capture the CO2 we emitted from burning fossil and make it plastics.
Of course this does not make sense in a world where we do not have enough energy to even keep datacenters open.
Edit: To clarify, I do not propose burning fossils to capture CO2 and make plastics. I am a Thermo Laws believer.
ok_computer
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
sonofhans
That sounds like a hack from late-game Factorio: pollute enough that you can just pull iron filings right out of the air. Everyone wins! Except the meatbags who need to breathe the air …
adrianN
The problem with carbon capture from air is the low carbon concentration. Try to do the math for how much air you need to process to get even one barrel of oil worth of hydrocarbons from a DAC process.
marcosdumay
There is way more carbon in the ground as rocks than as oil. If you have plenty of energy, the difference is quite manageable.
Besides, as somebody already pointed out, there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of. It's nothing compared to the rocks, and a little harder to get, but getting it first would improve things a lot.
ok_computer
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
tesseract
> there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of
For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.
throw0101c
> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat.
I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.
Is this accurate?
dmurray
This can't be accurate.
Let's say a barrel of oil travels 15,000 km from Saudi Arabia to Texas, gets refined, gets shipped another 10,000 km to Europe, then the last 1,000 km overland by truck.
This reasonably well sourced Reddit post [0] says big oil tankers burn 0.1% of their fuel per 1,000 km, smaller ones a bit more. Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
From the same source, a truck burns about 3% per 1,000 km. This seems too high: for a 40,000 kg loaded truck that's less than 1 kmpl or 2.5 mpg. But let's believe it, double it for empty journeys, and we still only get 16%.
I used very conservative estimates here: surely most oil doesn't travel anywhere near that far.
Alternative thought experiment: look at the traffic on the highway. If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jozd7/e...
sokoloff
> you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
I’d expect tanker trucks to carry far more fuel than the typical vehicle.
mschuster91
> Say 0.2% on aggregate, that's 5% for the whole journey, 10% because the ship is empty half the time.
Fuel saves from slow steaming and being empty are massive.
> If this were true, even neglecting oil burnt for heating or electricity or aviation, you'd expect 40% of the vehicles to be tanker trucks.
The US has a lot of domestic pipelines [1], and a lot of the remainder is done by train [2] because trains are the most efficient way to transport bulk goods over extremely long distances.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/geography/geospatial-portal/us-petroleum...
[2] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/AAR-US-Rail-C...
jml7c5
I suspect this is confusion between the statistic that 40% of global shipping traffic is transportation of fossil fuels.
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...
porknubbins
Say a tanker truck has a roughly 300 gallon fuel tank and a 10,000 gallon payload tank (per google). Thats roughly 3% loss to cross a lot of the US, which is by no means insignificant but assuming ships are not any worse and the pipeline to the ship is minimal, around a manageable 6% loss.
ygra
Trucks need a lot more infrastructure in a lot more places than ships, though. I guess that's not often factored in.
victorbjorklund
I very much doubt that number. Maybe it was referring to 40% of the price of oil for consumers comes from the stages after pumping?
0cf8612b2e1e
I also don’t have a source, but I have heard that 15% of global energy is dedicated to handling petroleum (extracting, transporting, refining) which feels like a plausible number.
foota
This doesn't math out to me just based on what I know of energy consumption numbers.
matkoniecz
Sounds really dubious to me. Tankers and pipelines are really efficient.
I would not believe it at all without source.
Maybe someone got confused by "transportation" altogether being major consumer?
testing22321
It must be way higher if you really got into it
i.e. A friend that works on rigs is flown to and from rigs from anywhere on earth every month, then choppers out to the rig and back. Same for everyone that works on the rigs.
victorbjorklund
The helicopter fuel is a drop in the oil ocean. You can just check this but checking how much oil that rig produces per month. How many flights the helicopter does every month and the amount of oil needed for it. It’s gonna be a drop in the bucket. Otherwise it would not be profitable to drill for oil.
matkoniecz
And? Given how much typical oil rig produces this would not be a serious part of its production.
tmellon2
[flagged]
yread
I find it amazing how "naphtha" can mean crude oil, diesel, kerosene, gasoline or kind of white spirit.
EDIT: oh and it comes from Akkadian! how many Akkadian words do you know?
undefined
TheJoeMan
And RP-1 Rocket Fuel and Jet-A Jet Fuel are both Kerosene!
yuppiepuppie
There is a cool game that someone posted a while ago about this https://hnarcade.com/games/games/refinery-simulator
noer
If you're interested in how the oil industry as a whole operates and why, Oil 101 is an interesting read.
gf263
By Morgan Downey?
balderdash
Highly recommend
didgetmaster
I remember driving by a refinery years ago and it had two or three towers with big flames that were just burning off waste gas. This seemed wasteful to me. If it can burn, then it seems like it could be used for something productive.
Do they still just burn off that gas?
sushibowl
Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for.
Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process.
Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.
deepsun
That's why plastic bags are so cheap -- ethanol is a byproduct, but you earn more if you discard it and sell only oil.
But the burned up ethanol would be perfectly suitable for products.
Nowadays there are some regulations to prevent that, so they may sell up ethanol at negative prices sometimes.
UPDATE: Ethene, not ethanol.
nayuki
You wrote ethanol (C₂H₆O), but do you mean ethylene/ethene (C₂H₄)? Polyethylene (PE) is a very common plastic, such as HDPE, LDPE, PET.
beerandt
Yea while $ viability is true, it's better to think of as
1) using some potentially useful products as fuel to burning off things you don't want and
2) the buffer to keep non-steady inflows in a suitable ready condition for steady-state processing. (When real world steady-state is less than ideal.)
Number 2 is really what dominates the equation, as shutting in gas sources or even just turning off pipelines is incredibly more complicated than just an 'off' switch.
And turning back on is even more complicated. In the case of wells, once you shut in, turning back on may never result in the same level of production as before.
the-grump
It's usually a small amount of waste, and handling gas is very different from distillate.
You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.
undefined
JohnKemeny
They flare to quickly burn off excess gases as a safety mechanism rather than anything else. Venting gas into the air would be much worse.
noisy_boy
Can't that burning be converted into energy like boiling water to turn a turbine to generate energy? Or not worth the payoff?
chasd00
the way it was explained to me is if you see the flares then something is wrong. It may not be catastrophic or anything serious but something isn't going according to plan. Because you're right, why burn it off when you can sell it?
beerandt
It generally means something is out of balance, which doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong. Usually not.
But if something is wrong, yea you can bet they will be burning off with big flares.
tomtomistaken
NO₂ column density over the Jamnagar refinery mentioned in the article: https://no2.libmap.org/?month=0&lat=22.2223&lng=69.7911&z=8....
didgetmaster
The article does a good job of showing how a typical barrel of oil is converted into a dozen or more distinct usable products.
It would be helpful to also have a chart that shows how much gasoline or diesel as a percentage of each barrel is produced. It would be a bit variable, since not all crude oil is the same, but I think it would be close for most of it.
Some people think when diesel and regular gas prices diverge, that they should just be able to produce one at the expense of the other; but the distillation process shows that they are fundamentally different.
kryptiskt
You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.
icegreentea2
Some crude averages from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.
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About thirty years ago, I was given a personal tour of an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan. I was doing freelance translation then for a Japanese oil company. I mentioned to one of my contacts there that I would be interested in actually seeing the sort of equipment I was translating documents about, and they arranged a visit for me.
Two things stand out in my memory:
Even though the refinery was in full operation, we saw no other people as we walked and drove around the facility. The only staff we saw were in the control room, and they didn’t seem very busy.
The other was the almost complete lack of odors. That particular refinery is close to an upscale residential area, and the company had to be careful to keep sulfurous and other gases from escaping in order to avoid complaints and possibly fines. Some of the documentation I was translating then was about their system for detecting and preventing odor releases. As I recall, they had people walk around the perimeter and local neighborhoods regularly, just sniffing for smells from the plant. On the day we were there, I noticed petroleum odors only when we were close to one of the refining towers; otherwise, the only smell was from the nearby Tokyo Bay.