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Lecture 3: Composition of oil and gas

Course subject(s) 3. Composition of oil and gas

The lecture is started with an explanation on the composition of crude oil. The main hydrocarbon molecules present in crude oil, like paraffins, naphtenes and aromatics, are discussed. Structural formulas are shown as graphical representations. Moreover, the main method to analyze the composition of oil, gas chromatography, is explained.

Thereafter, application of distillation products are discussed. After fractionating the crude oil by distillation, the main products are gas, gasoline, kerosine, diesel, oils and residuum. The applications of these fractions are all shortly discussed. For gasoline moreover, there are some extra production methods mentioned. The lecture is ended with a summary.

The above recorded lecture covers the following topics:

  1. Composition of crude oil (In Petroleum Geoscience: paragraph 1.6 ‘The chemistry of petroleum’)
  2. Application of distillation products
  3. Summary
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Petroleum Geology by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/petroleum-geology/.
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