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Show Waste Gases in Oil Plants Are Used to Profitable End, Scientists Reveal One oil company is manufacturing manufactur-ing sulphuric acid from its waste by-products, and is turning out eighty-five tons of acid every day, says Popular Mechanics Magazine. Other major oil companies are producing pro-ducing alcohol from their waste gases. It is estimated that the industry in-dustry is producing 4.000,000 gallons of methyl, ethyl, and other alcohols every year, cheaper, and in some cases practically the same as the alcohol produced from grain. A radiator ra-diator anti-freeze called ethylene glycol is still another derivative. In some oil fields iodine is manufactured manufac-tured from the salt water flowing up with the oil from the ground. This growth is taking place because be-cause petroleum chemists are finding find-ing dozens of answers to the question ques-tion of what to do with waste refinery refine-ry gases. Ordinary crude petroleum consists of large numbers of molecules mole-cules of different complexity, each type being a d:.Terent combination of hydrogen and carbon atoms or arrangements of them. The lightest ones are gas molecules, heavier ones are just right for motor fuel, and still heavier molecules are used for lubricating oil. Straight-run gasoline gas-oline is produced by heating petroleum petro-leum until the gasoline molecules evaporate. Then they are collected in a condenser. It amounts to a sort of screening process. Potentially there is still a lot of gasoline left in the petroleum after the first run fuel is distilled off. The next step Is to crack the oil, cooking cook-ing it under heat and pressure to break some of the heavy fractions down into molecular sizes that fall into the gasoline classification. In doing this, large quantities of gas are created and in the past these gases were simply piped away a safe distance and burned. These waste gases consist of mixtures of so-called saturated paraffin gases such as methane, ethane and propane, pro-pane, as well as a number of other gases. |