With the entry into the 21st century, petroleum refining technology is experiencing its great innovation driven by the increasing supply of heavy feedstocks with decreasing quality and the fast increases in the demand for clean and ultraclean vehicle fuels and petrochemical raw materials. As feedstocks to refineries change, there must be an accompanying change in refinery technology. This means a movement from conventional means of refining heavy feedstocks using (typically) coking technologies to more innovative processes (including hydrogen management) that will produce the ultimate amount of liquid fuels from the feedstock and maintain emissions within environmental compliance. This chapter presents suggestions and opinions of the means by which refinery processes will evolve during the next three to five decades and a discussion of what this evolution means to the environment.

Crude oil use and the associated technologies, in one form or another, is viable for (at least) the next 50 years until suitable alternative forms of energy are readily available and developed on a sufficient scale to (at first) complement crude oil use and then (eventually) to replace crude oil as the dominant source of liquid. This chapter focuses on the various types of nomenclature used by the oil and gas industry as well as the types of crude oil that exist and could be recovered from offshore locations in which the reservoirs are under large bodies of water (specifically oceans).

As the refining industry evolves even further and, in many cases away from natural gas and crude oil as the major feedstocks, a variety of biomass and waste-derived feedstocks will be used as feedstocks fuels production and this may be no more evident than the use of biofeedstocks for gasifier units. This chapter presents an overview of the production of the potential of fuels production and chemicals production from alternate sources (non-fossil fuel sources) in order for the reader to understand the chemical and physical parameters that are involved in the production of alternate fuels. For the purpose of this chapter, the alternate sources of energy are presented: biomass, which includes agricultural crops and wood, and waste, which includes waste from domestic and industrial sources. One form of pretreatment is separation and recycling of waste components, thereby removing a portion of the waste stream for recycling and other uses.