Me and my partners want to make our own gas for our cars how do we build a refinery?

Question

i don't give a d**n about permits regulations or enviroment c**p. just how to build and operate

Answer 1

Sounds like you are into a methane gas project.  Perhaps you could design a vehicle, probably a van type or motor home that would be completely self-contained, so that it would be the vehicle,the holding takn,  the processing plant, and provide the fuel for the methane-powered engine.

I think you and your partners are on to something here.

Answer 2

You can't build a refinery - you would blow up the whole neighborhood, plus you couldn't buy the crude oil anyway.

It has been proven on mythbusters that you CAN run a diesel engine on filtered used vegetable oil!

Get your hands on an old Mercedes and try it!  Get the oil from restaurants - they will give it to you for free!

Answer 3

"Don't give a d**n about regs, environment and safety !!! you may be inline for a darwin award"   Consider the flash point, the temperature at which the liquid will produce enough vapor to sustain combustion.

The flash point for gasoline is -40F (minus 40 F) while diesel has a flash point of 143F.  This meas that gasoline is very esay to ignite.   But you should already know that.....

To answer your question:

The basic concept is "Fractional Distillation"   this is a process where specific temperatures are used to boil off a component then condesnse the vapor to recover the disstillate.

Most people are familiar with alcohol distillation where alcohol boils at 180F (water boils @ 212F).   Heating the fermented mash to 180 causes just he alcohol to boil off. The vapors are collected and passed through a copper coil to cool and condense. THe condensate is alcohol.

A barrel (42 US gal) of crude has several different volatile components each with different boiling points, so the initial heating is at a low temp until all of that component is boiled off and collected. Lighter products are distilled first progressing to teh heavier disstillates.

THe temperature is raised to the next boiling point and a different component is boiled off and collected.. This process continues until just a fraction of the original raw volume is left. The remaining crude having given up its gas and kero and other iight components turns into goey tar.

In refineries additional processing is done (Catalytic Cracking) to chemically convert and extract additional gasoline from the heavier products.   The result is that a barrel of crude will produce on average 43% of its volume as gasoline.

Assuming you can extract this efficiently that means you will get  18 gallons of gas worth $54 ($3/gal) from a barrel of crude that cost you $100 not to mention the qty or residual c**p left over.     So your homebrew gas would cost you at least $5.50 a gal not counting the additional costs to process it(equip & energy)