Lipstick, Aspirin and Asphalt, Everything a Barrel of Crude Oil Becomes

Let me ask you to do a small experiment. Walk through your house and your day and touch only things that have nothing to do with petroleum. Skip the toothbrush. Skip the shampoo bottle, the phone case, the carpet, the cooler, the insulation in the walls, the lenses in your glasses and the road you drove to work. Skip the ambulance that would come if you fell off the ladder. What is left? A rock, perhaps, and a very uncomfortable afternoon.

That is the thing the slogan "keep it in the ground" never quite gets around to mentioning. Crude oil is not just gasoline with extra steps. It is the raw material for a modern civilization, and when a politician says he wants to end oil, the honest follow-up is: end which part? Let me walk you through what actually happens to a barrel.

First, the Barrel

A barrel of crude oil is 42 gallons. That unit goes back to the early days of the American oil business in Pennsylvania, after Edwin Drake drilled his famous well near Titusville in 1859 and the industry had to ship its product in something. Casks of about that size, already common in older trades, were on hand, and the standard stuck.

In those early years, the valuable product was not gasoline at all. It was kerosene, which people burned in lamps and which displaced whale oil as the light of choice. Gasoline was long a low-value by-product of making kerosene. Then the automobile arrived, and the waste became the prize. The history of the refinery is the history of learning to use every part of the barrel, and I will tell you that the same impulse that served Rockefeller's refineries serves every refinery today: nothing is wasted, because a wasted fraction is lost money.

What a Refinery Does

Crude oil, as it comes out of the ground, is a mixture of thousands of different hydrocarbons, molecules made of carbon and hydrogen of different sizes. Small molecules are light and boil at low temperatures. Large molecules are heavy and boil at high ones. A refinery sorts and rearranges them.

Distillation. The first step happens in a tall steel tower called a distillation column. Crude is heated until most of it turns to vapour, and the vapour rises through the column, which is cooler toward the top. Different fractions condense at different heights. The lightest, such as gases used for propane and butane, rise to the top. Next come the fractions used for gasoline blending and naphtha, then jet fuel and kerosene, then diesel and heating oil, then heavier gas oils. What never vaporizes sinks to the bottom as a thick residue. It is physics doing the sorting, with no chemical change at this stage.

Cracking. Here is the clever part. The mix that comes out of distillation does not match what the market wants. There is more heavy stuff in a typical barrel than anyone needs, and not enough gasoline and diesel. So refiners break the big molecules into smaller ones. In a fluid catalytic cracker, heavy gas oil meets a hot powdered catalyst and splits into lighter products. In a hydrocracker, the same thing is done with hydrogen under pressure. In a coker, the heaviest residue is heated until it breaks into lighter liquids and a solid called petroleum coke.

Reforming and blending. Other units rearrange molecules to raise the octane rating of gasoline, remove sulphur to meet clean-fuel rules and combine fractions into the finished fuels you buy.

I want to be clear about why this matters politically. A refinery is not a machine you can tune to make only one product. If you reduce the demand for one part of the barrel, the rest of it does not disappear. It has to go somewhere, and the economics of the whole barrel depend on selling all of it.

What Comes Out of the Barrel

The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, publishes a breakdown of the products American refineries make from a 42-gallon barrel of crude. I will give you the general picture and encourage you to look up the current figures at the agency's website, because they shift a little from year to year.

• Gasoline is the biggest single product, on the order of nineteen or twenty gallons from each barrel.
• Diesel and heating oil, the "distillate" category, come to roughly a dozen gallons.
• Jet fuel is about four gallons.
• The rest is a long list: propane and other liquefied gases, heavy fuel oil, asphalt and road oil, petroleum coke, lubricants, waxes and the feedstocks for the chemical industry.

Here is the detail that surprises people. The total is more than 42. A barrel of crude yields about 45 gallons of products, because the refining process, with its cracking, adds volume. The products are lighter and less dense than the crude, so a gallon of crude makes more than a gallon of product. The agency calls this processing gain. It is not magic and it does not violate any law of physics; it is the result of breaking heavy molecules into lighter ones that take up more room.

So gasoline is somewhere around 40 to 45 percent of what comes out. Let me show the arithmetic with round numbers. Twenty gallons of gasoline out of 45 gallons of total product is 20 divided by 45, which is about 44 percent. Roughly 56 percent of what a refinery makes from a barrel is something else.

Lipstick, Aspirin and Asphalt

Now the products on the list that nobody thinks of at the pump.

Asphalt is the residue at the bottom of the barrel, the thick black material that holds together the surface of most paved roads in America. Every time you drive on a road, you are driving on a petroleum product. Every time a politician promises to build or repair a road, he is promising to buy it.

Plastics begin with petrochemical feedstocks. A steam cracker takes ethane, which comes from natural gas, or naphtha, which comes from crude oil, and breaks it into ethylene and other building blocks. Ethylene becomes polyethylene, the stuff of bags, bottles and pipes. Other chemicals become polypropylene, polystyrene, PVC and nylon. The syringe, the IV bag, the oxygen mask, the heart monitor casing, the helmet and the car seat all begin there.

Medicines. Many drugs are made from petrochemical starting materials. Aspirin is a good example. The industrial synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid generally begins with phenol, which is made from benzene, which comes from petroleum. When you take an aspirin, you are taking a molecule that started in a refinery. I do not say this to scare anyone. I say it to illustrate how deeply the barrel runs into the pharmacy.

Cosmetics. Many lipsticks, lotions and creams use petroleum-derived ingredients such as petrolatum, mineral oil and waxes, as well as synthetic fragrances and colours made by the chemical industry. Hence the title of this post. The point is not that every lipstick is a petroleum product, but that a large class of everyday goods leans on the stuff.

Everything else. Synthetic rubber, solvents, adhesives, paints, detergents, fibres for clothing and carpets, insulation foam, the coating on electrical wire, the lenses of eyeglasses. The list is not an exaggeration. Walk through any hospital, school or kitchen and keep counting.

Natural Gas and the Food on Your Plate

Oil is not the only fossil fuel doing quiet work. Natural gas is the feedstock for one of the most consequential chemical processes in history.

In 1909 the German chemist Fritz Haber showed that nitrogen from the air could be combined with hydrogen to make ammonia. Carl Bosch at BASF turned the laboratory trick into an industrial process, and the first large plant began operating in Germany in 1913. The Haber-Bosch process takes nitrogen from the air and hydrogen, which today is usually obtained from natural gas by a process called steam methane reforming, and combines them under high temperature and pressure to make ammonia. Ammonia is the basis of most nitrogen fertilizer.

Why does this matter? Because nitrogen is what plants need most and what soil runs short of. Before synthetic fertilizer, farmers had to rely on manure, crop rotation and imported guano. The scientist Vaclav Smil has estimated that a large share of the people alive today, on the order of two in five, would not exist without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. I give you that as his estimate and not as my own measurement, and I encourage you to read his work. But the direction is not in doubt. Natural gas helps feed a large share of humanity.

When someone says "end fossil fuels," the farmer asks a fair question. Where does the fertilizer come from? There are research efforts to make ammonia from hydrogen produced by electrolysis using clean electricity, and the technology is real. But it is far more expensive and much smaller in scale than the existing industry. Replacing a process that feeds billions is not a matter of changing a light bulb.

The Argument in Numbered Form

1. A barrel yields many products, not one. About 45 gallons of products come from 42 gallons of crude, and gasoline is under half of that.
2. Those other products are not luxuries. They include diesel for trucks and farm machinery, jet fuel for aviation, asphalt for roads, and feedstocks for plastics, medicines and countless goods.
3. Natural gas underpins food. Haber-Bosch ammonia, made from gas, supplies the nitrogen that a large share of the world's crops depend on.
4. Therefore "keep it in the ground" is a much bigger promise than "drive less." It is a promise to replace the physical basis of modern life, and anyone making it owes an account of how.
5. Replacing it is possible in places and in time, but it is not cheap or quick. Honest policy starts with that fact.

The Strongest Objection

The best argument against what I have just said is this: knowing that oil has many uses does not make the burning of it a good idea. Most of a barrel is burned as fuel, and the carbon ends up in the air. Only a fraction becomes durable goods. So we can keep a smaller oil and gas industry for plastics, medicines and fertilizer while ending the use of fuel, which is where almost all of the emissions come from. Call it keeping the molecules for chemistry and leaving the fuel behind.

Let me concede what is right. Fuel use is the bulk of consumption, and an economy could in principle shift toward a smaller petroleum industry focused on materials. Some people honestly argue for that.

Now the response, and it has four parts. First, the products are joint. A refinery that stops making gasoline does not make only chemicals, because the economics of cracking and distillation depend on selling the whole slate. Shrinking the fuel side raises the price of the rest. Second, the transition would take decades of investment in electric systems, new materials and new industrial processes, and the cost lands on consumers. Third, a country that makes the policy choice unilaterally gives its competitors the market, since the demand for these products will not vanish at the border. Fourth, the claim that we can simply replace the products is made far more often than it is proven. A responsible plan names the replacement, the cost and the date.

None of this means we should stop looking for better ways. It means the honest conversation starts with the full barrel.

Why This Is a Question of Liberty

There is a larger principle in this, and the Founders would have recognised it. A free people decides for itself what kind of life it wants to lead and what energy it will use to lead it. A government that wishes to remove a whole class of materials from the economy is making a decision for millions who never agreed to it. The Declaration of Independence names "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as unalienable rights, and the pursuit of happiness has always depended on tools: the plough, the engine, the road, the medicine. When a policy touches the base of all of those tools, it deserves to be argued in the open and decided by representatives who answer for it.

It is also a question about who we trust. The same officials who explain that this is simple are not the ones who will be explaining to a farmer why the fertilizer costs twice as much, or to an ambulance crew why the supply is short. For a related account of how many people around the world still lack the energy basics we take for granted, read Hundreds of Millions Still Cook Over Wood, and That Is a Moral Question. And for the historical record of dire warnings about oil that never came true, see Running Out of Oil Was Forecast for a Century, So Why Hasn't It Happened. How government shapes the price you pay at the pump is covered in Four Pieces of Every Gallon and Why the President Controls the Fewest.

What Replacing It Would Really Take

If you were serious about replacing the petroleum products, here is what you would need to do, and notice that each item is a project, not a slogan.

• Fuels for aviation, shipping and heavy trucks. These need energy-dense liquid fuels, and the substitutes, such as synthetic fuels and biofuels, are costly and limited in scale.
• Plastics and chemicals. The building blocks would have to come from another source, such as biomass or recycled material, at a cost and volume that compete with ethane and naphtha.
• Asphalt. Roads would need a new binder, or a new surface, across millions of miles.
• Fertilizer. Ammonia would need a new low-cost source of hydrogen, at the scale of the current industry.
• Medicines. Pharmaceutical supply chains would need new starting materials.

Each of these is possible in part, and some will probably happen as technology improves. Markets and inventors, not mandates, have found the best substitutes in the past, as the shift from whale oil to kerosene showed, and nobody had to ban the whale. That is the lesson to hold on to. The way to replace a product is to build something better and cheaper. The way not to replace it is to forbid it first and hope.

The Case in Brief

1. A 42-gallon barrel of crude yields about 45 gallons of products, and gasoline is under half of them.
2. The rest includes diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, lubricants and the petrochemical feedstocks for plastics, medicines and countless household goods.
3. Natural gas supplies the hydrogen for Haber-Bosch ammonia, the basis of nitrogen fertilizer that feeds a large share of the world.
4. Keeping oil and gas in the ground would therefore mean replacing the physical foundation of modern life, not just changing how we drive.
5. A free people is entitled to ask, before any such change, what replaces each product, at what cost and by when.

What you can do: Look up the Energy Information Administration's page on what a barrel of crude oil makes, share the numbers with a friend, and ask your representative how a proposed fossil fuel restriction would affect fertilizer, medicine and road costs.