How do you turn oil into plastic?

Answer 1

Today most plastics are made from crude oil and natural gas, although they can be also produced from corn and other biomasses. First, refineries process the crude oil to produce fuels, such as gasoline, and many petrochemicals. Petrochemicals then are used by chemical plants to obtain many products, like fertilizers, lubricants, and plastic resins. Plastic resins are, in turn, used to produce many different types of plastics.

Refineries and manufacturers use process called Catalytic Cracking to break Crude Oil into Liquefied Gases, Gasoline, Diesel, Asphalt, and many others, and then reforming and alkylation processes to turn simple hydrocarbons of Liquefied Gases and/or Naphtha into polymers (chains of molecules). Polymers are then processed into plastics that we know today.

Answer 2

Oil is a carbon-rich raw material, and plastics are large carbon-containing compounds. They're large molecules called polymers, which are composed of repeating units of shorter carbon-containing compounds called monomers.

Answer 3

The process involves both kinds of change. Essentially it's chemical because plastics are different substances from the hydrocarbons in oil. However, some steps such as fractional distillation are physical.

Answer 4

It's made during the refining process of the oil, where petroleum is the base that you use to make plastic.

Answer 5

It's a chemical change. You are transforming one molecule (the hydrocarbons used as base stock) into another (the polymer).

Answer 6

These are chemical changes,
A chemical change involve chemical reactions and the transformation of reactant molecules in products molecules.

Answer 7

melt it