REFINING AND MANUFACTURING PETROLEUM PRODUCTS As has already been intimated, the Pennsylvania oil discoveries of fifty years ago would have been relatively valueless if methods of refining had not advanced sufficiently to develop the marketable possibilities. If the reader has followed this narrative he will not have failed to note that it was the optimism of experimental chemists, who discerned in petroleum the possibilities of an illuminant which would take the place of whale oil and other fats, which first suggested to pioneer investors like Bissell the idea of developing America’s oil fields by the boring system. Certain crude traditional methods of refining petroleum had prevailed for centuries in the East, but they had not produced an illuminant that would be acceptable to our civilization. The advancement of science, which gradually enabled the early American refiners to produce a comparatively odourless, safe, and free-burning oil from the crude, gave the necessary stimulus to the new industry. The American refining system has since become one of the greatest examples of standardized industry, fascinating in its minutiae, and amazing in the efficiency and economy of its organization. The pipe-line system has promoted the establishment of great central refineries whither the crude travels distances of anywhere from five hundred to fifteen hundred miles, and which, by treating it in vast quantities, are enabled to provide the world with the products of petroleum at the lowest possible cost. It is the purpose of the refining process to produce from the crude petroleum marketable products and this involves two stages. First: The separation of the crude petroleum into its constituent parts, corresponding in general to gasoline, kerosene, lubricating oil, etc., and, subsequently, the purification of each of these roughly separated products to bring them into marketable condition. The process might be best understood by likening the crude petroleum to gravel scooped from out of the hillside. Such gravel would consist of a mixture of sand, fine gravel, coarse gravel, rocks and boulders. In this condition it would be unmarketable, except perhaps to fill up marshy land. By analogy the crude petroleum consists of a mixture of many different compounds and the mixture itself is unmarketable and of no value except as a fuel, at once troublesome and dangerous. To prepare the freshly mined or “crude” gravel for the market it would be sifted through a series of screens which would separate it into its component sizes. As a result of the sifting operation there would be produced builders’ sand suitable for use in mortar, fine and coarse gravel desirable for concrete, rough rock for road foundations, and boulders for masonry structures.