The trade mission I had sent to the Spanish March, the northern border of modern Spain, returned successfully. The geological maps of my time showed oil seeps in the area.
The seeps were in this universe, just not in the exact spots, but close. The caravan brought back barrels of raw crude oil. It was heavy, smelly, tar-like, and wonderful. Modern civilization depended on oil for lubricants, fuel, and plastics.
I was excited to receive the samples. A strange little man accompanied the shipment. Jussuf Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn, an Arabian studying what could be distilled from oil and its possible uses.
My conversation with him in Latin revealed he was an Alchemist by trade, but was making the transition to being a true Chemist.
When our people showed up to buy the crude oil, he immediately started questioning what we wanted it for. The answers he received made him curious enough to accompany the caravan back to Cornwall.
I asked him, "Why were you in the Spanish March? I think your area of the world has plenty of rock oil."
I was surprised to learn the Latin word for rock oil was petroleum!
"We have plenty of rock oil, but it is more refined than this. It appears to be lighter, a finer grade than this. I am looking for the most basic form of this rock oil."
"Ibn, you have found it. It is the heaviest form that seeps from the ground."
"What will you do with the samples you brought back?"
"We will figure out how to refine it to more useful forms. Distilling it at different temperatures will give off different grades of this oil."
"How do you know this if you haven't done it?"
"I have a book which describes it."
"May I see this book?"
"Certainly, but it must be tomorrow."
"I can wait."
I didn't tell him the wait was because I had to transcribe it from my memory. Thad and his friends would be working late tonight.
I invited Ibn to dinner with my family that night. He appeared surprised when my Cathy spoke to him in Latin.
"You educate your children, even the females?"
"We educate everyone."
"Not just the wealthy?"
"Tomorrow, we will give you a tour of our schools and our chemical research laboratory. We also have several factories that will interest you."
The next morning I presented Ibn with a copy of a short book on the basic chemistry of oil.
"It may be difficult reading in some places. I had to translate it into Latin last night. Plus, there may be terms you are not familiar with. I will be glad to explain those terms.
The Latin would be pretty good as my mind automatically translated as I read. The terms in question wouldn’t come into use for a thousand years.
I went about my business, holding court and attending meetings on my many operations while he went through the book. It took him a week and he had a hundred or more questions for me, but he did it.
Most people would have taken a year to read and understand the concepts introduced in that basic chemistry book. I was impressed.
Once he had gone through it, he asked if there were any others I could share. I said yes, but I wanted to show him a few things first.
I took him on a tour of the Penicillin and Chloramphenicol manufacturing facilities. I explained that while investigating chemistry, our end goal was to make useful products. To say he was blown away by the plants and what the two medicines could accomplish was putting it mildly, not to mention the aspirin we had started to produce. It was a lifesaver in bringing patients temperatures down.
I even took him to the balloon plant to watch the hydrogen generation plant in action. When I took him up in a balloon, I swear he peed his pants. He was excited, not fearful.
"As you can see, we use chemistry in practical applications. I wanted you to understand this before I showed you our chemistry laboratory."
"I understand. Your books tell you what to do but not entirely how to do it. You have to experiment to come up with the correct method."
"By Jove, he's got it."
From his blank look, he hadn't read, 'Vanity Fair.' Why that surprised me, I don't know. I bet he hadn't even watched 'My Fair Lady' when it came out. I may be losing it with this cross-time and dimension stuff. It's hard being a cross-time engineer.
I took him to the chemistry lab and introduced him to Peter Owen-nap. In the two years Peter had been on the job, he had matured into a solid young man who got the job safely done with no muss and no fuss.
The only problem with Peter was he had little imagination. He could follow the formulas meticulously, but if there was an inconsistency, he wasn't able to devise a solution. When he ran into one of these roadblocks, I had to step in.
But Peter was doing a good job, so I didn't want to demoralize him. He was good at running our small-batch operations.
I promoted him to Senior Assistant Chemist in charge of small-batch operations and gave him a nice raise. I also hired him as a Junior Assistant responsible for cleaning the glassware. Wet chemistry uses a lot of glassware.
This gave me room to hire Ibn as a Senior Chemist.
"Ibn, would you like to work here?"
"Very much so. How much?"
"One hundred silver a month."
Ibn looked dejected for some reason.
He replied, "I can't take the job. I can only afford fifty silver a month."
"You have misunderstood me. I will pay you one hundred silver a month."
"I accept!"
"I will have two new houses built, one for you and one for the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer."
Peter and Ibn thought that title was the funniest thing they had ever heard until Peter asked a question.
"Does that mean my wife won't pick up any extra coins for cooking for visitors when we have them?"
"Chief Cook and Bottle Washer is just a saying. The new assistant will only wash bottles. Your wife can continue her cooking duties."
I continued, "Ibn, I want you to continue finding methods to refine oil and extract the various fractions."
"That will be a pleasure. Do I have a budget to work with?"
"Submit requests for new equipment to the Glassmakers and the Smiths. I will arrange for them to be paid. This is important for the future of Cornwall."
Ibn and I had many conversations over the next few weeks as he delved into modern chemistry. He was like a kid on Christmas morning with so many new toys he didn't know which one to play with first.
I transcribed every book I could on elementary chemistry. Oil refining was high on my list, but he had to learn to walk before running. Once he understood what was happening, he could begin fractional distillation.
Fractional distillation separates a mixture into many different parts, called fractions.
A fraction of crude oil is a mixture of chemicals in the crude oil with similar boiling points.
A tall fractionating column is fitted above the mixture, with several condensers coming off at different heights. The column is hot at the bottom and cool at the top. Substances with high boiling points condense at the bottom, and substances with lower boiling points condense on the way to the top.
The crude oil evaporates inside a furnace before entering the fractionating column, where its vapors condense at different temperatures. Each fraction contains hydrocarbon molecules with a similar number of carbon atoms and a similar boiling point range.
In order from the bottom of the column to the top, we would expect bitumen, fuel oil, lubricating oil, diesel, kerosine, naphtha, petrol for cars, and petroleum gases.
My immediate needs were lubricating oil and naphtha. We would save all the fractions to create a stockpile but didn't have a current need. The bitumen would be produced no matter what, so we would start using it for roads, as it would cost less than concrete in time and effort. Concrete was overkill for horse-drawn carts and wagons when we could use bitumen, what we knew of as tar, to stick gravel together.
Ibn was curious about everything. And since he was now a working team member, I let him in on our technology The steps to silver mirrors and making gun cotton had him mumbling for days.
He questioned why we didn't use hot air instead of flammable hydrogen for our balloons. I asked him how he knew hot air would make a balloon rise.
He told me he had been to India and saw ceremonies where they released small hot air balloons to carry messages to the Gods. That was where he first encountered what we called Arabic numerals, which should actually be called Indian numerals.
"We need our balloons to stay up for a long time as observation stations. It is a matter of fuel. Refined fuel would be the safer choice."
Ibn finally presented me with a simple plan for our first refinery. It would be a batch system rather than a continuous flow. We were years, if not decades, away from the continuous flow process.
His plan touched on separation, conversion, treatment, and storage.
Separation involves piping crude oil through hot furnaces. The resulting liquids and vapors are discharged into distillation units.
Conversion occurs after distillation. Heavy, lower-value distillation fractions can be processed further into lighter, higher-value products such as gasoline. We would be doing almost no conversion at this stage of the game.
The finishing touches occur during the final treatment. To make gasoline, the refiner had to combine a variety of streams from the processing units. Once more, treatment is a process that will wait until the future.
The bottom line is that separation will be our objective initially, with limited secondary processing of the resulting factions.
We will build storage tanks, but they will be one thousand gallons or less rather than the huge ones in the twenty-first century. There will still be a tank farm with safety berms in case of spills.
I gave the go-ahead to build the infrastructure and equipment needed to start a batch process. Despite not having a secure supply source, I decided it was worth the risk.
Having made the decision without data to back me up, I decided to do some research. Late, but better than never.
A forty-two-gallon barrel of heavy crude oil would yield one-half of a gallon of lubricating oil. That was by twenty-first-century refining methods. I hoped we could get a quarter of a gallon yield.
One thousand gallons of lubricating oil would take four thousand barrels or over one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of crude oil.
We couldn't run enough caravans to transport four thousand barrels of crude oil. But maybe we could capture a port on the Spanish March.
It would be a departure from everything I had done before. I had only conquered those who had attacked me and moved into empty lands due to the plague. I had never invaded someone that hadn't attacked me first.
I didn't like that thought at all and dismissed it.
The next point to be considered was refining the crude oil on site in the Marches. That would be the most economical way to do it. One thousand gallons or twenty-four barrels would be easy to do.
The bitumen would be wasted as it would be too much to transport to Cornwall, and we didn't need it. We could start paving roads in the refinery area. And we could use the bitumen as fuel for the refining process.
The question then was about building a refinery in the Spanish Marches and supporting infrastructure for the people who would be manning and defending the refinery.
I didn't doubt it would need defending. Independent or state-sponsored, thieves would consider it a rich target.