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Design Your Own Oil Refinery

7-12th Grade Science - Chemistry 

Content Topics

  • Discovery of oil in local area
  • Geology of oil in local area
  • Components of oil and how it is used
  • Refinement of oil using fractionation

Duration Three - 55 minute periods

Objective: 

Students will read articles about oil discovery in your county. Students will learn about where and why wells are located where they are in the county. Students will learn about how oil is used to make different products. Students will build an oil refinery fractionation unit and measure the products using a Vernier Gas Chromatograph.

Overview and Purpose:

Oil is among the most important fossil fuels and has significantly shaped the way technologies have developed throughout human history. Not only has petroleum energy been used for energy for thousands of years, but it is also used to make many products including plastics. People first began using oil as they found it seeping to the surface, but they were unaware that it existed as vast reserves underneath them. Typically, oil reserves are stored in anticline geological formations, which are upward folds in the strata that trap natural gas and oil within impermeable layers. Oil forms from the remains of marine organisms that are broken down by bacteria into organic substances called kerogen and bitumen. Heat, pressure, and time underground eventually transform these materials into oil, which seeps into rocks and becomes trapped in the impermeable layers. 

In order to separate all of these components in crude oil, it must be refined. Crude oil is made of two to a large variety of different hydrocarbons, ranging from four to more than 60 carbons bonded in chairs. These different types of carbons can be separated by a process called fractional distillation, which is a physical process. The crude oil is heated at different temperatures in a chamber. The smaller hydrocarbons separate and distill off at lower temperatures while the larger hydrocarbons separate at higher temperatures. Each fraction is used for different purposes. Though many technologies are emerging to substitute for this nonrenewable resource, its abundance and the infrastructure built to utilize oil will likely result in our dependence for years to come.

Guiding Questions: 

  • How was oil discovered in your county? 
  • What products is crude oil used to make?
  • How is oil refined into different parts?

Education Standards:

  • HS-PS1-3. Plan and conduct an investigation to gather evidence to compare the structure of substances at the bulk scale to infer the strength of electrical forces between particles. [Clarification Statement: Emphasis is on understanding the strengths of forces between particles, not on naming specific intermolecular forces (such as dipole-dipole). Examples of particles could include ions, atoms, molecules, and networked materials (such as graphite). Examples of bulk properties of substances could include the melting point and boiling point, vapor pressure, and surface tension.]
  • HS-PS1-2. Construct and revise an explanation for the outcome of a simple chemical reaction based on the outermost electron states of atoms, trends in the periodic table, and knowledge of the patterns of chemical properties. [Clarification Statement: Examples of chemical reactions could include the reaction of sodium   and chlorine, of carbon and oxygen, or of carbon and hydrogen.] [Assessment Boundary: Assessment is limited to chemical reactions involving main group elements and combustion reactions.]

Materials and Resources:

Local Resources:

Part 1 (55 Min)

Introduction/Hook:

Students will be introduced to the history of oil in the local region and when the industry started. 

Primary source/artifact:

Students will look at a picture of the oil refinery model. 

Objective Overview:

The teacher will explain that students will learn about the how, where, and why of oil in the local region. Then, they will describe the Oil Refinery model they will use to distill and fractionate crude oil.

Lecture/Presentation:

The lecture presentation will review oil and natural gas, how it was discovered, and how it forms.

Part 2 (100 Min)

Activity:

Students will design and build a condenser apparatus to serve as an oil refinery using synthetic crude oil. 

Students will isolate the fractions and test them using a Vernier Gas Chromatograph to see the differences in retention times.

Students will do the Refinery Maze activity to model molecular size and distillation.

HCLEAPSS Recipe A for Synthetic Crude Oil

An artificial crude oil mixture is distilled in a side-arm test tube with increasing temperature and the fractions coming over in different temperature ranges are collected and examined

The recipe from CLEAPSS consists of mixing together in a glass bottle :

  • liquid paraffin (mineral oil) (medicinal) (55 cm3)
  • paraffin oil (kerosene) (20 cm3)
  • white spirit (11 cm3)
  • petroleum spirit 100 to 120°C (4 cm3)
  • petroleum spirit 80 to 100°C (4 cm3)
  • petroleum spirit 60 to 80°C (6 cm3) and
  • a little black oil based paint to make the mixture black. A squeeze from a tube of Newton and Windsor’s Black Ivory oil paint is convenient.
  • Label the bottle Highly Flammable and Harmful, stopper and shake well. Shake well before use.

Assessment (20 Min)

Students will complete the activity shown below to show their learning from the Design Your Own Refinery lab and the Refinery Maze activity. They will use the data from the Refinery Maze to create a step-wise line graph.

Design Your Own Oil Refinery (1).pdf