Chinese scientists develop method to refine crude oil at room temperature

Beijing: Chinese scientists have found a way to separate crude oil into refined products molecule by molecule at room temperature, cutting energy use by 90% compared to traditional distillation.

Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have pioneered a method called “molecular refining,” which uses chemical membranes designed like sieves to allow certain ingredients to pass through while filtering out others.

Traditional refining leverages variations in boiling points and requires crude oil to be boiled repeatedly, consuming huge amounts of energy. The new membranes separate molecules based on size difference of just one-hundredth of a nanometer — for example, separating straight-chain alkanes used to produce ethylene from multi-branched alkanes used for gasoline.

In lab tests with a light sweet crude mixture containing 15 different chemicals, the process separated it into three groups of high-value products with a recovery rate of 85 to 90%, with 91% less energy used as nothing needed to be boiled, vaporized or condensed, the authors reported in National Science Review.

The discovery is still lab-scale and not yet proven scalable to the global petroleum industry. If scaled, it could dramatically reduce cost and emissions. Oil refining was estimated in 2021 to contribute around 1.3 gigatons of CO2 per year, about 4% of global emissions, making it the third largest stationary contributor.