Five minutes it took us to fill the gas tank of our vehicle and most of us are not aware of the millions of years that were needed to produce that wonderful fuel, nor do we know all the processes that are done to extract gasoline from petroleum. Venezuela currently has the largest proven oil reserve in the world so we can also infer that it also has the largest gas reserves.
We can begin by understanding that gasoline is not a pure substance, but a mixture of hydrocarbons (substances formed mainly by Carbon and Hydrogen) that pose in their molecules (stable group of atoms) from four to eleven atoms (smallest particle of an element chemical) carbon, gasoline is not achieved alone in nature but is part of the thousands of compounds that make up oil, now oil is not the same everywhere and depending on its components we can obtain oil with various values of density (grams that weighs a cubic centimeter) so we have from the lightest gasoline-rich to the heaviest in bases for lubricants and asphalt. All this complex process of extracting gasoline and other petroleum components is done in industrial facilities known as refineries. In Venezuela, the Paraguaná Refining Center is the second largest in the world, with the capacity to refine 940,000 barrels of oil per day (one barrel equivalent to 35 gallons).
Without going into many technical details we can say that the oil is pumped to distillation towers where it is heated and boiled to its components which rise up the tower and are separated depending on their boiling point (temperature at which a substance passes from liquid to vapor) the lightest among them gasoline they come out through the top and the heavier ones through the bottom, later those components are stored for their later treatment.
Dear friend, let me know your opinion about this post, basically I would like to know if I was able to explain with simple words something that in itself is very complex.