Some may go as high as a quarter million barrels a day. One refinery up in Venetia, where the ships come in and unload directly into the refinery and they process it. They don’t even have storage for it. Can you imagine running a business like that when the boat doesn’t come in? Or it hits something. You are in bad shape. But things like that don’t happen very often. So they make gasoline, jet fuel and monomers. So where does all the jet fuel from San Francisco airport comes from? It comes from these refineries but you don’t see trucks coming in. There are pipelines that go under the bay that carry jet fuel from the refinery directly to the airport, puts into underground tanks and the jets are fueled. Jet fuel is really nothing more than kerosene basically; it has a certain boiling fraction of crude oil. That means it boils at a certain temperature and jet engines are designed to accept that certain kind of fuel.
We can also make monomers and monomers are basically small molecules, say like ethylene and if you start attaching them to one another and many ethylene molecules together, what do you think you get? Polyethylene. You don’t get the bottles right away but you get the polyethylene which you then cast or mold or blow mold into bottles, milk cartons or whatever.
If I take polyethylene which is nothing but carbon, carbon, carbon with hydrogen hanging from them, then replace every other hydrogen with a chlorine atom. I’ll get polyvinyl chloride. If I replace everyone with a benzene ring, I get styrene. If I replace all the hydrogens with fluorine, I get Teflon. So it is kind of cool, isn’t it? I mean this is how you get all the things you hear about all come from these monomers which get attached to each other like chains or railroad in a railroad car. And polyethylene is up there. Cute. I can see now why. (Laughter)
So silicon crystals, you probably don’t realize that Intel — who do you think Intel hires? What kind of disciplines? EEs, wrong. There are more Chemical Engineers working at Intel than there are EEs. In fact, Andy Grove was a classmate of mine and he was the president of Intel for many years. Why on earth did I not go with him? He’s living up here, big house. I live down here, in a drain gutter. I mean it is so awful. But Andy Grove understood things like diffusion, reaction and chemistry and was able to help develop the technologies to grow very large, up to now 12-inch pure silicon crystals that are then cut into wafers under which you impress the architecture that results in the transistors that are basically collected together. That of course, the EEs don’t make. The EEs, if you will, are sort of the architect of what’s getting imprinted. The Chemical Engineer provides the framework on which these can be drawn and does the cooking. In other words, these things have to doped, and they have to be chemically reacted in order to get a chipset out of it.
Inorganic materials which are basically non-carbon containing materials result in such things as ceramics, and other raw materials such as glucose or sugars can be converted through biological means using microorganisms into things like pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals. This is becoming a very, very huge industry particularly since Recom and DNA happened in the early 1970s where we now have control over the genome and we can take microorganisms that are surviving out there and the dirt and we can coax them to into making chemicals that otherwise, they wouldn’t have made because they just didn’t evolve to make those things, but we can use them as basically little engines, little machines and we can grow trillions and trillions of them in a test tube, you can generate a lot of production capacity.
Many of our students now go into besides refining or petrochemicals which is polymers production, which is still a very robust industry is protecting and improving the environment. One, after you destroy the environment, and then you come and fix it up. So there are two things that you do want to know. The first thing is don’t destroy in the first place, but if you happen to, chemical engineers are very much involved in what is called remediation. One of the things that we have real problems with is that people have, over the years, sort of hawked down on the ground or punch a hole in the ground and they dump everything in it that they don’t want and lo and behold, it gets mixed up in the groundwater.
Introduction to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 6
chemical engineering expert witness
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