{"id":214658,"date":"2025-05-24T13:08:36","date_gmt":"2025-05-24T18:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-new-approach-could-fractionate-crude-oil-using-much-less-energy"},"modified":"2025-05-24T13:08:36","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T18:08:36","slug":"a-new-approach-could-fractionate-crude-oil-using-much-less-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-new-approach-could-fractionate-crude-oil-using-much-less-energy","title":{"rendered":"A new approach could fractionate crude oil using much less energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-new-approach-could-fractionate-crude-oil-using-much-less-energy.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Separating crude oil into products such as gasoline, diesel, and heating oil is an energy-intensive process that accounts for about 6% of the world\u2019s CO<sub>2<\/sub> emissions. Most of that energy goes into the heat needed to separate the components by their boiling point.<\/p>\n<p>In an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/crude+oil\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">crude oil<\/a> fractionation, MIT engineers have developed a <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/membrane\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">membrane<\/a> that filters the components of crude oil by their molecular size.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process. Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size? The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/small+molecules\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">small molecules<\/a> at an atomistic length scale,\u201d says Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Separating crude oil into products such as gasoline, diesel, and heating oil is an energy-intensive process that accounts for about 6% of the world\u2019s CO2 emissions. Most of that energy goes into the heat needed to separate the components by their boiling point. In an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1497,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-energy","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}