What is oil made of?
Oil is a dark red-brown, sometimes almost black, oily liquid. It contains about 1000 substances! The largest part of them (80-90%) are hydrocarbons, that is, organic substances consisting of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Oil contains about 500 hydrocarbon compounds – paraffinic (alkanes), which make up half of all petroleum hydrocarbons, naphthenic (cyclanes) and aromatic (benzene and its derivatives).
In addition to the hydrocarbon part, oil contains a small non-hydrocarbon part – compounds of sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen. There is quite a lot of sulfur in oil – up to 5%, and it brings a lot of trouble to oilmen, causing corrosion of metals.
Vanadium, nickel, iron, aluminum, copper, magnesium, barium, strontium, manganese, chromium, cobalt, molybdenum, boron, arsenic, potassium and other chemical elements are found in small quantities in oils.
