Oil refinery
industrial process plant where crude oil is processed and refined into more useful products
An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refined into products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt base, fuel oils, heating oil, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas and petroleum naphtha. Petrochemical feedstock like ethylene and propylene can also be produced directly by cracking crude oil without the need of using refined products of crude oil such as naphtha. The crude oil feedstock has typically been processed by an oil production plant.In 2020, the total capacity of global refineries for crude oil was about 101.2 million barrels per day.
Oil refineries are typically large, sprawling industrial complexes with extensive piping running throughout, carrying streams of fluids between large chemical processing units, such as distillation columns. In many ways, oil refineries use many different technologies and can be thought of as types of chemical plants. Since December 2008, the world's largest oil refinery has been the Jamnagar Refinery owned by Reliance Industries, located in Gujarat, India, with a processing capacity of 1.24 million barrels (197,000 m3) per day.
Oil refineries are an essential part of the petroleum industry's downstream sector.
History
The Chinese were among the first civilizations to refine oil. As early as the first century, the Chinese were refining crude oil for use as an energy source. Between 512 and 518, in the late Northern Wei dynasty, the Chinese geographer, writer and politician Li Daoyuan introduced the process of refining oil into various lubricants in his famous work Commentary on the Water Classic.
“Oil refinery” enters the record as industrial process plant where crude oil is processed and refined into more useful products. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what refinery, industrial and process can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Oil refinery” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, refinery, industrial and process provides the most credible route into that argument.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12353044. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2008.
Current terminology should not be projected backward without checking the classification used when the underlying evidence was created. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oil refinery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.