CRUDE OIL

Petroleum consists mostly of hydrocarbon molecules. The four main classes of hydrocarbons are paraffins (also called alkanes), olefins (alkenes), cycloparaffins (cycloalkanes), and aromatics. Olefins are absent in crude oil but can be formed in certain refining processes. The simplest hydrocarbon is one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms (chemical formula CH4), and is called methane.

Petroleum usually contains all of the possible hydrocarbon structures except alkenes, with the number of carbon atoms per molecule going up to a hundred or more. These fractions include compounds that contain sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, and metal atoms. The proportion of compounds containing these atoms increases with increasing size of the molecule.

he chemical structure of petroleum is composed of hydrocarbon chains of different lengths. These different hydrocarbon chemicals are separated by distillation at an oil refinery to produce gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, and other......

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Title: Crude Oil
Approximate Word Count: 331
Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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