Sublime

Crude oil needs refining to separate the complex mixture of hydrocarbons into specific fuels—gasoline being the lightest; residual fuel oil the heaviest—but this process yields more valuable fuels for specific uses, and it also produces indispensable non-fuel products such as lubricants. Lubricants are needed to minimize friction in everything from

The Standard’s commitment to long-distance pipelines was the beginning of the end of the railroads’ dominant role in petroleum transport. Rockefeller began to negotiate what were effectively reverse-rebate arrangements, guaranteeing the roads minimum returns for maintaining their oil-shipping facilities whether or not he used them. The last step in

All of these products begin as ethane. In North America and the Middle East ethane is separated from natural gas,

Tarbell especially romanticized—men whose lives ran “swift and ruddy and joyous . . . until a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” But the hard fact was that with two or three exceptions, the region’s refiners were among the least efficient of all. As production technology shifted to favor

imported natural gas are high, is naphtha derived by the distillation of crude oil.