It’s a little-known fact that everyday essentials like shampoo, cosmetics, and detergent are made from petroleum. By exploring the complex process of how petroleum is extracted from underground, refined into crude oil, and transformed into a variety of products, you can understand how the products we take for granted come to be.
Shampoo, cosmetics, detergents. These three products are essential to our lives and help us feel clean. Shampoo to wash away the day’s grime, cosmetics to hide imperfections and boost confidence, and detergent to keep our clothes and homes clean. We take them for granted. Without these products, our lives would be vastly different. They make us cleaner and better versions of ourselves. They whiten clothes with black dirt, cover dark freckles with flesh-colored skin, and bring life to our hair. In color terms, they make black feel white and bright.
But would you believe it if we told you that they’re actually made of black? They’re all made from dirty petroleum. The truth may surprise you. Not many people realize that many of the products that make our lives easier and more beautiful have their origins in petroleum. Not many people realize that many of the products we take for granted now have their origins in petroleum. But our lives would be very different without it, and its presence in the world is more than just a resource.
It’s not just a raw material for products, it’s a critical foundation for modern civilization. It’s the fuel that powers our cars, the energy that runs our factories, and the engine that drives the global economy. When you realize that so many of the products we use every day come from oil, it’s a reminder of its importance. So let’s take a step-by-step look at where and how oil comes from, because it doesn’t just fall out of the sky.
First, let’s take a look at its ancestry. Our father was Crude Oil and our grandfather was Well, and it was only obtained after two refining processes. So let’s travel further back in time to find oil wells and crude oil. Oil wells are created when organic matter left behind by living organisms from past geologic periods is subjected to 500 atmospheres of pressure, geothermal heat above 50℃ and below 150℃, and more than 1 million years of time. This process is a marvel of nature that has been going on for tens of millions of years, and oil is a kind of “liquid gold” created by the earth. So, deep underground, a well has been created that meets these conditions. There’s only one problem left. To put it simply, you drill it and suck it out with pipes. However, since most of the oil wells are offshore rather than on land, there are many difficulties.
But Korea’s Han River miracle, which surpasses Germany’s Rhine River miracle, has come up with something called a drillship. These drillships are usually about 220250 meters long and 3545 meters wide, and they drill holes in the seabed to insert pipes to extract crude oil, but the process of drilling holes is not easy. If you go to the playground and dig a hole in the sand, you’ll get to a certain point, but if you keep digging, you’ll find that the sand on the sides is crumbling away. The same thing happens on the ocean floor. So, to prevent the hole from collapsing after a certain depth, a support pipe is planted and cement is placed between the hole and the pipe. This is called drilling, casing, and cementing, and it’s all part of the same set. After repeating these operations, we end up with the well we were looking for.
Now, to regulate the flow of these wells, we install the X-mas Tree, which consists of valves and chokes. The name comes from the fact that it resembles a Christmas tree. After such a long and complicated process, the granddaddy of oil is finally extracted, and we are blessed to have such a cheap product. But don’t let your guard down: the oil is still on the seabed and hasn’t even been refined into crude.
Old, tired oil wells that have traveled a long journey are about to give birth to their offspring, and let’s take a look at the process. The wells on the seabed are transported through pipes to an FPSO or production facility. An FPSO or a production facility? These are the elements needed to turn the well into crude oil. The most common FPSO stands for Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading Unit, and it’s a ship that floats on the ocean to produce and store crude oil before transferring it to a tanker that carries the oil. The oil that is drawn up through the drilling process on a drillship is separated from the FPSO’s separator in a simple process. There are three main types of oil in an oil well: gas, oil, and water, which are layered by density difference, so the heaviest water forms at the bottom, followed by oil, and the lightest gas at the top. Therefore, a hole is made at the bottom to separate the water, a hole is made at the top to separate the gas, and a partition is made in the middle to separate the oil. Finally, our protagonist, the crude oil, is standing alone after a long, long journey.
Now free and alone, Crude Oil goes on a cruise on a tanker, rests, and enters a distillery to give birth to a son named Petroleum. Fractionating distilleries use the difference in boiling points to differentiate between products. Let’s look at water and methanol for a moment. Water boils at 100°C, while methanol boils at 64.1°C. If you heat a mixture of water and methanol to 80°C, the water will remain liquid because it hasn’t reached its boiling point yet, but the methanol will boil and turn into a gas, and the lighter gas will rise to the top. This is how crude oil is separated into petroleum, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, heavy fuel oil, and asphalt.
Once this process is complete, the petroleum extracted from crude oil is the raw material for many products that play an important role in our daily lives. Petroleum is used as a fuel on its own, but it’s also used to make plastics, chemicals, and even medicines. The petrochemical industry provides a wide range of substances that are used in products we use every day, such as electronics, clothing, car parts, furniture, and more. Having finally completed its mission, crude oil disappears into the past, leaving behind a number of children, many of whom are now indispensable.
Shampoo, cosmetics, detergents. These are products that we can easily buy at the store, but we can now understand the complex and long process of obtaining the oil needed to make them. It’s easy to take them for granted because they’re so readily available, but when you wash your hair in the morning, put on your makeup, or wash your clothes, take a moment to think about the long journey. Here’s to the oil that’s still traveling somewhere!
