Refineries give great opportunities for fresh graduates. You may be surprised but it is true that the largest and most sophisticated single stream refinery in the world is Reliance Refinery in Jamnagar with capacity of 33 MMTPA(MM means Million).

There are many refineries in India apart from Reliance which are listed below:

1. Guahati Refinery, IOCL, Assam

2. Barauni Refinery, IOCL, Bihar

3. Koyali Refinery, IOCL, Gujarat

4. Mathura Refinery, IOCL, Uttar Pradesh

5.Digboi Refinery, IOCL, Assam

6.Panipat Refinery, IOCL, Haryana

7.Mumbai Refinery and Vizag Refinery, HPCL

8.Mumbai Refinery, Kochi Refinery, BPCL

9.Manali Refinery, CPCL, Chennai, Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu

10.BRPL and Numaligarh Refineries in Assam.

MRPL, Tatipaka Refinery, Haldia Refinery and Petrochemicals, etc. are other refineries. Bina Refinery in Madhya Pradesh is one of the 3 refineries under construction. Refineries provide are a testing stone especially for Chemical, Mechanical and other engineers.

First of all you should know that crude petroleum consists of more than 5000 compounds consisting of mainly Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Sulphur plus traces of metals. So, refineries are very complex, you guessed it right! Oil is measured in barrels. A barrel is about 159 litres. The density of liquid petroleum is measured in degrees API. This is extremely important. Please note that if density of oil is Row then Deg.API will be ((141.5/Row)-131.5). It is not for nothing that each domain has its own terminologies. It is for practical reasons such as easy measurement and communication and type of people working on it.

You should also know about distillation curves. You can be sure that any mixture will not boil at one temperature. It is a temperature range and that is exactly what this curve is about. There are many types of curves. True Boiling Point(TBP) curve is one of them. Then there a curve which is quite popular known as ASTM D86.

Let us know what are some of the major operations done in Refineries.

1. Atmospheric Distillation : Here the crude first split up into light naphtha, heavy naphtha, Light distillate and heavy distillate(Kerosene) and bottoms which are sent to Vacuum distillation.

2. Vacuum Distillation

3. Cracking

4. Catalytic Cracking.

5. Blending of Gasolene, Diesel etc.

6. Treatment of Gasolene

7. Coking and Coking Fractionators: Coking is for production of Coke which is used in

metallurgical industries.

8. Alkylation, Isomerisation

9. Hydrogen Treatment

10. Asphalt and Bitumen Blowing

11. Deawaxing plant for production of wax used in the production of candles and other wax based industries.

Domain knowledge is important in refineries. Hence you can refer some books such as: “Petroleum Refiner Engineering” by Nelson. You can also refer to “Modern Petroleum Refining Processes” by B.K.Bhaskar Rao (Oxford and IBH Publishing). If you want to go into deeper design refer to “Petroleum Refinery Distillation” by R.N.Watkins.

Refinery products are nowadays increasingly transported by pipelines and hence providing more job opportunities.

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