Found thisarticle mentioning that ISIS is thought to have “mobile oil refineries” that it uses to make ~2 million/day.
What? I was under the impression that an oil refinery was a huge plant with a complex maze of pipes, and that bigger refinery/chemical plants are much more efficient than smaller ones. This is because organic synthesis needs huge numbers of precursor products, so if you build a new plant connected to existing plants, you have a competitive advantage over starting from scratch elsewhere. This is why in certain places in Texas there are mega-complexes of interconnected oil refineries spread out across many square miles.
So how do you cram this into a mobile vehicle and build an apparatus that is efficient enough to be profitable? What does this monstrosity look like? Does it resemble something out of Mad Max? Always did wonder where they got their fuel from. Can you do enough refining steps in a simple “mobile refinery” to reach a fuel that can be burned in diesel engines? What about gasoline?
The different components, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, etc., of crude oil have different boiling points. IIRC refinery’s heat the crude into a gas, and then cool the gas in lowering levels of temp at the condensation points of each grade of fuel.
I imagine that a mobile refinery would just heat up the crude to the BP of what they need and collect the condensation (product), and dump the rest. The heating should be done by insulated electric heaters, tho I hope these guys are using open flame.
Refining does not require any chemical reactions. It can just be distillation. It may also include simple operations like cracking. The wiki article talks about the various processes and products Oil refinery - Wikipedia
As a general comment, the problem of scaling up processes is a huge issue throughout all types of manufacturing.
What works in a lab probably needs to be changed to do small-scale applications and those need to be altered to do large-scale applications. They may all be successful in producing the final product, but they are never interchangeable.
I thought ISIS was about 5,000 nuts with AK-47s. Yep, I’ve been a bit out of touch the last couple of weeks (Wife did and Ironman, been busy).
The Hell? Mobile refining units? Yep, I understand that fuel is made from crude by basically boiling it. But really, can they pull up to a well and create diesel?
The video link I attached in post #4 basically shows a group of amateurs (and a child) boiling crude in a metal container, distilling the evaporate in pipes in a plastic sheet surrounded pit filled with water, and one guy using a bucket to collect the refined product into barrels. All done in the middle of the Syrian desert.
$2 million a day in income from the refined oil. The spot price for every refined product except propane (gasoline, diesel, heating oil, kerosene) is right about $2.70 a gallon delivered to NYC. But of course it isn’t going to NYC and it is black market so it has to be a lot cheaper, say $1 a gallon delivered to Damascus (yes, they are supposedly selling it their enemy according to a supposed expert on CNN tonight). If it is $1 a gallon (and it could be a lot less), that means that they are shipping 2 million gallons of refined product a day. Now a tanker that delivers fuel to a gas station carries about 9000 gallons, which would translate to about 222 tanker trucks a day leaving the mobile refineries and trucking across the desert to Damascus. And if they don’t have access to those big tankers then it could be 500 or 1,000 tankers crossing the desert EVERY DAY. Has anyone noticed them? On satellite images? Spy planes? And if we have seen them why haven’t we just bombed the convoys? is there no interest in that? Or maybe the whole story is one big crock of shit. Who knows? Any opinions?
According to CNN again, ISIS is selling the refined product for $30 a barrel and a barrel contains 42 gallons. So, $0.714 per gallon. I just did the math and that comes to 311 of those 9000 gallon tankers a day, every day. And they have to return to be refilled. So that seems like a lot of tanker traffic crossing the desert. I imagine that not all of it is going to Damascus. Maybe they are selling it to the Iraqis too - also their enemy. Whatever, why aren’t we targeting the transport system?
Even at 60 a day thats a long way short of the $2 million a day figure. I’m sure in a few years when ISIS is just another smoking wreck left behind that the $2 million a day in oil figure will be revealed to be just as much a sham as the mobile WMD labs in Iraq.
Note the “$2 million a day” figure is estimates from analysts based on the output of oilfields that they control. As you point out no one has ever seen the vast amount of tankers it would take to ship that much.