Introduction

Gasoline is a component of crude oil, the most important modern raw material which provides a source for 70% of Britain's organic chemicals. Crude oil is formed over a period of many millions of years during which time the remains of small marine animals are buried and compressed by layers of overlaying rock consequently undergoing chemical change to form crude oil.

The oil is drilled and extracted, however, it is of little use in its raw state and so has to be separated into its individual components by a process know as fractional distillation.  

One of these fractions is that of gasoline, the focus of this website. The major use of gasoline is as a fuel in internal combustion engines, the most popular of which is the car engine used for transport. The demand for gasoline varies across the globe with the greatest demand in the USA whereas in Western Europe it is far lower and so a significant proportion of the gasoline fraction is used to produce chemicals called naphthas via a process known as cracking.

The importance of gasoline is obvious, without it modern life just could not function as it does. However, with the potential threat that exhaust emissions from the combustion of gasoline and burning of other fossil fuels have on humans and the environment, efforts are being made to find alternative viable sources of energy in addition to modifying current fuels to try to reduce these harmful pollutants. These modifications involve the addition of polymers and oxygenates to gasoline as well as methods to filter out the toxic pollutants via the use of catalytic converters.