Blog Post 10: 

Discuss how the Second World War affected the development of petroleum refinery processes.

Evolution of a refinery is based on the demand in which the consumers have for the products. When the automobile industry came about it sparked a huge demand for gasoline and other lubricants which in turn made the industry grow. This extreme growth in demand lead to the creation of the thermal refinery. In the Second World War just using heat within a refinery was not enough to meet the demand for high performance fuels. Even with the rapid introduction of various thermal cracking processes, only 20% of the gasoline produced in the U.S. came from thermal processes. The catalytic refinery was then brought about which continued after the war.

The Catalytic Refinery arrived at a very important time for the making of high performance gasoline and other petroleum fuels in the period leading to and during the World War II. Developing catalytic processes had completely re-worked the chemistry of petroleum refining.  World War II was the backbone for urgently developing catalytic technologies. A catalytic refinery closely resembles the refineries today with a focus on making high yields of gasoline.  Through catalytic processes with the introduction of hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, reforming, alkylation, and polymerization the way of making high octane number gasoline has been built.

A catalytic refinery incorporated new thermal and separation processes such as delayed coking, visbreaking, and deasphalting.  The catalytic refinery produced large quantities of LPG and witnessed the increasing demand for kerosene jet fuel. During World War II there was a major increase for the development of refining processes.  The concerns for environmental pollution by the combustion of petroleum fuels, however, has brought emphasis on more effective finishing processes.  Because of this the modern refineries focus more on processing the heavy ends of petroleum and making cleaner fuels.