Online Diesel Source

What Is Diesel?

What is fuel?

Fuel is any combustable matter used to create heat or power. Wood, oil, coal, etc. are all forms of fuel. In the case of the combustable engine (diesel in our case), our original matter is petroleum. Another name for petroleum is crude oil, which usually comes in a liquid form ranging from very watery to very thick oil.

What is diesel?

Diesel is a type of fuel derrived from crude oil (petroleum ). Crude oil is pumped from oil wells, much like water comes out of water wells. Crude oil is made up of various compounds which have chemically different sizes, weights, and boiling points. Since the boiling points vary, a particular process can be used to separate the components from one another called fractional distillation.

Fractional distillation begins with crude oil going into a boiler tank where the oil is heated to about 600 degrees Celsius or 1112 degrees Fahrenheit. The crude oil exits the boiler and goes into a large column like tank which has several layers of chambers stacked one on top of another. The boiling crude oil goes into the bottom of the column and begins to vaporize and the matter moves into the first of many chambers. As the crude oil hits the first chamber, some of it condensates . Condensation occurs when the gas cools off just enough to revert back into a liquid (remember we started out with liquid crude oil). This liquid is then piped off from its chamber to a reservoir and we now have the first byproduct of crude oil. Whatever vapors did not condensate in the first chamber move up to the second chamber. Those compounds that have the next highest boiling point will cool, condensate, and be piped off to a reservoir.

These steps take place until we finally make it to Gas Oil or what is commonly known as Diesel. Diesel is an extracted oil from crude oil. Gasoline is also an extraction from crude oil, but it's simply higher in the stack of chambers. Generally speaking, it takes substantially more crude oil to produce large quantities of Gasoline than it does to produce the same amount of diesel.