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Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make.

I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.

Sounds about right. I work in the field contracting to a lot of plants and once they are built they don’t need a ton of people there. It’s really if they are doing shutdowns that there are a lot of people.

It’s worth mentioning here - the founder (Dhiru bhai) of Reliance used to pump gas in Dubai and that’s where he got the dream to start his own refinery one day. Dream one side, but just going about setting up such a giant production facility at an enormous scale is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Pretty sure he had overflow of grit, commitment, and all around strength, and of course high dose of highest level of talent.

My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.

Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.

Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.

It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.

What a massive shift in just 25 years.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...

Reminds me of the shareware nuclear power plant sims built for a similar purpose I used to play.

To me (as someone who has worked on oil rigs, oil pipelines, oil refineries, and chemical plants), crude oil seems far more valuable as a material than as an energy source. It feels like a damned shame that we're still combusting so much of it for heat rather than reserving it for physical materials.

I understand the ways that economics are very important, and that the economics still currently favor burning a large fraction of the crude oil. But I also know that the right kinds of investments and a bit of luck can often change those economics, and that would be nice to see.

> It also fails to note that most of the energy ends up us waste heat.

I've heard the statistic that 40% of the total oil pumped out of the ground just to transporting oil. We use almost half just to move it to and fro before even using it.

Is this accurate?

I was thinking the same thing! Having played through Factorio and a fair amount of GregTech really reframed my viewpoint on energy production that a huge part of the benefit of fossil fuels is the byproducts, not just raw energy output.

And RP-1 Rocket Fuel and Jet-A Jet Fuel are both Kerosene!

By Morgan Downey?

Highly recommend

Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for.

Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process.

Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.

It's usually a small amount of waste, and handling gas is very different from distillate.

You'd need to either liquify that gas or collect it to a pipeline in order to make it useful. I remember reading that modern refineries make use of the gases instead of flaring them though I'm not sure how.

They flare to quickly burn off excess gases as a safety mechanism rather than anything else. Venting gas into the air would be much worse.

the way it was explained to me is if you see the flares then something is wrong. It may not be catastrophic or anything serious but something isn't going according to plan. Because you're right, why burn it off when you can sell it?

You can to vary the split of the output by cracking heavier hydrocarbons into lighter. So it's not a fixed fraction, but driven by both demand and cost of processing.

Some crude averages from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.

"The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason"

California cities still struggle with smog. The valley geography capped by inversion layers are unique factors to LA, central valley cities, and some parts of the bay that really do necessitate unique solutions if we don't want to choke. There's sources that back this claim you're welcome to Google. Lastly, based on the overall tenor of your points, I'd invite you to question whether someone with an agenda is driving the incorrect facts you receive in your media diet.

A few corrections. Credentials: I am a Chemical Engineer in a Senior Tecnical Leadership position at a refinery with over thirty years of experience.

1) API gravity is the density of the crude oil. Higher API = lower density. We use this unit of measure because it magnifies the differences in densities vs. using conventional units of measure.

2) Refiners in the US mix different crude types to maximize the objective function ($) of a set of constraints including crude grade pricing and availability, product demand volume and pricing, refinery unit constraints and product quality specifications. This is done using a linear program model.

3) light and heavy crude contain the same molecules but in different ratios. For example they all contain gasoline, jet fuel, diesel boiling range material and all contain some amount of material that could be turned into ship fuel or asphalt for paving roads. Heavy crude tends to sell at a discount to light crude because of the laws of supply and demand - refiners will buy a mix of whatever makes them the most money.

4) “Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting”While US refineries sites are old - some site have been in operation for over 100 year, the units and configuration of the refineries has evolved continuously over the years. The technology used in the refining units has evolved as well - this is not a static industry. The pollution standard for refinery operations and fuel emissions have been raised multiple times. So “Very Polluting” vs. new refineries does not pass muster. US refineries have been retrofitting wet gas scrubbers and selective catalytic reduction units to reduce emissions of SOx and NOx for decades. These technologies reduce emissions of both pollutants by over 90%. Most of the emissions come from burning the fuel that refineries produce and both legacy US refineries and new ones have to meet the same fuel quality specifications and hence produce equivalent emissions.

5. “There are different blends of gasoline that the US produces. The biggest is so-called summer and winter blends. What's the differene? Additives are added to summer blends (in particular) to increase the boiling point so less of the gasoline is in gas form because that produces more smog;”

Summer gasoline contains less butane than winter gasoline. That is the main difference. Butane is added to winter gasoline so cars start in cold weather. There are no additives added to raise the boiling point in summer - just less volatile light material added.

As an aside, Mvodern gasoline vehicles have carbon canisters to capture vapors (such as butane) from the gas tank when not in service. These are then regenerated by sweeping air through them when the vehicles are running.

6. “ California uses their own blends so in 2021-2022 when CA gas went to $8+, it wasn't just "gouging". It doesn't really work that way. CA requires a particular blend that only CA refineries produce so it's simple supply and demand as no new capacity gets added to CA refineries and demand goes up with population growth. The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason;”

There is some out of date information here. California is a net importer of gasoline since refinery closures in California have outpaced reduced demand from increased fleet fuel efficiency / BEV adoption. There are refineries in Asia that export California and some other US refineries can also make California grade gasoline but this requires shipping via the Panama Canal on Jones act ships that are scarce and expensive.

P66 / Kinder Morgan are planning a pipeline / pipeline reversal that would bring refined product into California including California gasoline.

Looking at the chart in the article I was kind of surprised at how small wind and solar are globally and that coal is still ~25%.

> they're almost impossible to get permission to build now

While I do agree there's a ton of regulatory hurdle to cross to build a new refinery, lots of interviews with oil executives have stated the economics of building a new refinery aren't always great. The reasons why they aren't building isn't necessarily because the regulatory hurdles are too high, its that they don't think they'll end up making any money building them. The future demand of many refined products are uncertain, adding a lot of new capacity is quite a capital risk.

I'd love to see a lot of our ancient refineries shut down and replaced with far more modern designs, but the oil industry isn't going to do it because it probably won't be profitable.

It will be interesting to see the economics of these few new refineries coming online actually play out in the coming years.

> Most refineries in the US are very old and are very polluting

India's Reliance is also investing $300B [0] in a Texas megarefinery [1] in specifically for cleaner and more efficient shale refining.

This is deeply technical and complex but low margins work (semiconductor fabrication falls in the same boat) which saw this industry leave for abroad in the 2000s and 2010s when other states like China and India subsidized their refinery industries to build domestic capacity for a number of petroleum byproducts with industrial applications.

This is the same strategy Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used in the 1960s-90s as well.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-17/ambani...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...

What if everyone complained whenever someone linked to spiegel.de?

Have Claude make you a browser plugin that does the conversion and quit whining.

If you’re capable of doing basic math in your head you should be able to handle it.

Even if you do a rough conversion - subtract 30 and divide in half you’re close enough.

I read it right now. It was awesome to have this article by the side to understand the mechanics and not only the history and the power play

The supply of crude, from across the oceans.

Cars are the most familiar to the everyday user, which is why it's the most common in perception. It's also actually one of the easier ones to solve (ie it's basically done).

Trucking is technically not to hard but logistically difficult. Aviation is extremely technically challenging. Shipping is economically difficult. Electricity generation has lots of factors, there's a lot of generation that can and has been changed easily, but some generation which is harder to switch.

If you get outside of oil into CO2 generally, there's even thornier issues. Concrete production, for example.

If you are seriously interested in these issues, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/EngineeringwithRosie

It's not just gasoline, but a lot of it is gasoline

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...

Oil is cooked. BYD is filing 52 patents every single day and has a 700 km in 9 minutes vehicle available TODAY ! Charging by Solar is going to be the norm. Watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgCYYrhL-kE