News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by diginova on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:18PM (#47966317)
My father actually works at the Jamnagar refinery. I was bought up in there seeing and visiting the refinery as families are allowed for some trips every now and then. I learnt a lot of this process of refining out of curiosity of what my father did and it was just so cool. The refinery in context is the world's largest since more than a decade and seeing it with your own eyes, it feels like a wonder of the world for real. Truly marvellous outcome of perseverance and engineering. Loved to see this blog on the HN homepage, its very well written
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by alephnerd on Thursday April 30, 2026 @02:54PM (#47966729)
Would love to hear stories about it. Reliance is working on replicating the Jamnagar refinery approach in America [0] now as well.

It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain as well as see an industry that the US used to lead in increasingly become dependent those partners.

What a massive shift in just 25 years.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/reliance-...

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by mlinhares on Thursday April 30, 2026 @07:46PM (#47969805)
When all you can produce are finance bros this is the result.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by caminante on Thursday April 30, 2026 @09:29PM (#47970381)
Not really a big deal. The numbers are cumulative. The Reliance Brownsville Texas facility will only process 60 million barrels per year. That's 1% of annual US refining capacity.

> It's interesting to both see Asian majors and EPCs increasingly dominating the petrochemical chain

You really don't want downstream in your backyard, though. The environmental oversight in these countries is...less. Meanwhile, it's a hyper competitive industry with low margins so adding new capacity only works in places with cheap labor and less red tape.

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by alephnerd on Friday May 01, 2026 @06:17AM (#47973037)
Tech bros who don't know the industries they talk about should honestly STFU. It's the one annoying thing about HN. Y'all feel you need to talk but aren't actually contributing anything of value to the conversation.

Rebuilding refinery capacity within the US is hard, especially given that a net new refinery hasn't been built in the US in 50 years.

Honestly if YC agrees to delete my comments I'd be glad to leave this forum. Host HNers just aren't worth dealing with at this point.

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by caminante on Friday May 01, 2026 @08:07AM (#47973826)
Hey.

You're obviously having a bad couple days, which seems to have nothing to do with this discussion or HN.

I hope you can recover and feel better.

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by flumpmaster on Friday May 01, 2026 @01:15PM (#47977339)
“especially given that a net new refinery hasn't been built in the US in 50 years.”

Existing large refineries have done some massive expansion projects in the last couple of decades, adding the equivalent of a several new refineries. It is often easier to do this than build a new grass roots refinery.

Example projects:

MPC Garyville +180 MBD (2009) Motiva Port Arthur +325 MBD (2012) XOM Beaumont +250 MBD (2023)

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by eiee on Friday May 01, 2026 @08:10PM (#47981971)
There are many topics where you come across as an over confident plank too.

So I agree - delete your account. Ciao

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by throwaway7783 on Thursday April 30, 2026 @10:52PM (#47970836)
Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by spot5010 on Thursday April 30, 2026 @11:05PM (#47970919)
My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by mandeepj on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:23AM (#47971780)
It’s worth mentioning here - the founder (Dhiru bhai) of Reliance used to pump gas in Dubai and that’s where he got the dream to start his own refinery one day. Dream one side, but just going about setting up such a giant production facility at an enormous scale is nothing short of an extraordinary achievement. Pretty sure he had overflow of grit, commitment, and all around strength, and of course high dose of highest level of talent.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by Gud on Friday May 01, 2026 @06:22AM (#47973071)
Any source for this claim that Ambani started his career as a gas pumper? Or are do you mean someone else?
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by damnitbuilds on Friday May 01, 2026 @06:35AM (#47973159)
Nah, he did it the old-fashioned way - by corruption and dirty dealing, then his family suppressed the people reporting the truth:

https://archive.ph/i3FWt

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by caminante on Friday May 01, 2026 @10:35AM (#47975270)
They're still playing above the law and read anti-corruption regulations as "how to" manuals.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by newyankee on Friday May 01, 2026 @09:23AM (#47974538)
Wow, I had seen the inside of the refinery still partly under construction way back in 2003 when I was barely out of my teens.
Re:How an Oil Refinery Works by KolibriFly on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:45PM (#47978462)
That must be an incredible place to grow up around