The gunk that clogs oil filters just became the filter — and it could cut refining energy by nearly a third

Every refinery on Earth starts the same way: boil crude oil hotter than 350°C (662°F) to split it into petrol, kerosene and the building blocks of plastics. That boiling uses about 1,100 terawatt-hours of energy a year — roughly the output of 130 large nuclear plants running non-stop. A team led by Professor Dong-Yeun Koh at KAIST in South Korea, working with Professor Ryan Lively's group at Georgia Tech in the USA, tried something almost embarrassingly simple: run real crude oil through a cheap, bare plastic membrane and let the oil do the work. Heavy parts of the oil coat the membrane's pores and narrow them to less than 2 nanometres wide — small enough that light fuels slip through at room temperature while heavy parts are held back. The clogging engineers normally fight became the filter itself. In the study, published in Nature, oil passed through about 23 times faster than through the best previous crude-oil membranes, and the membrane kept working steadily for 28 days. Computer simulations suggest that adding this step before normal boiling could cut a refinery's energy use by 31.6%, its carbon dioxide emissions by 37.6% and its running costs by 36% — and if used across South Korea's refining industry, it could avoid about 10 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, about what four million petrol cars emit.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation