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Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

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Scientists Just Found a Way to Cut Oil Refining Energy by More Than Half

Oil is one of the world's most important resources, but turning crude oil into useful products like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemicals requires enormous amounts of energy. For more than a century, oil refineries have relied on a process called fractional distillation, which heats crude oil to extremely high temperatures so that different components can be separated.

Now, scientists have developed a groundbreaking membrane technology that could dramatically change the future of oil refining. According to a new study published in Science, a specially designed membrane can separate important oil components while using far less energy than traditional methods. If adopted on an industrial scale, this innovation could make refineries cleaner, cheaper, and more energy-efficient.

Why Oil Refining Uses So Much Energy

Crude oil is a complex mixture containing thousands of different hydrocarbons. Before it can be used, these hydrocarbons must be separated into products such as gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, lubricants, and raw materials for making plastics and other chemicals.

Today, most refineries use continuous fractional distillation. In this process, crude oil is heated to very high temperatures, causing different compounds to boil at different points. These vapors are then collected separately.

Although effective, this process has a major drawback—it consumes enormous amounts of energy. Researchers estimate that around 11% of the energy contained in crude oil is spent simply on refining it through distillation.

The problem becomes even greater because many hydrocarbons have very similar boiling points. Since distillation cannot easily separate these similar compounds, refineries must use additional processing steps that consume even more energy and increase operating costs.

A Difficult Separation Challenge

One of the biggest challenges in modern oil refining is separating aliphatic hydrocarbons from aromatic hydrocarbons.

Aliphatic hydrocarbons are long chain-like molecules commonly found in fuels, while aromatic hydrocarbons have ring-shaped structures. Aromatics such as benzene, toluene, and xylene are valuable chemical building blocks used to manufacture plastics, paints, synthetic fibers, detergents, medicines, and many everyday products.

Unfortunately, these molecules often boil at nearly the same temperatures, making them extremely difficult to separate using traditional distillation.

Because of this, the refining industry has been searching for more efficient technologies capable of distinguishing molecules based on their chemical structure rather than just their boiling point.

Why Previous Membranes Were Not Good Enough

Scientists have long explored membrane technology as an alternative to thermal separation.

A membrane acts like a microscopic filter, allowing certain molecules to pass while blocking others.

Several polymer-based membranes have already been developed, but they suffer from two major limitations:

  • They usually allow only a small amount of oil to pass through, reducing production speed.

  • They often cannot selectively separate specific classes of hydrocarbons with high accuracy.

The main reason is that conventional polymer membranes have irregular pore structures that are difficult to precisely control.

As a result, previous membrane technologies never became practical replacements for large-scale refinery operations.

A New Type of Smart Membrane

To overcome these problems, researchers turned to an advanced class of materials known as Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs).

COFs are crystalline porous polymers whose pore sizes and chemical properties can be carefully designed at the molecular level.

Instead of relying only on boiling temperatures, these membranes separate molecules according to their size and chemical characteristics.

The research team designed several new COF membranes with gradually increasing alkyl chain lengths. These alkyl groups make the membrane more "oil-friendly" and help attract aliphatic hydrocarbons while blocking aromatic molecules.

The membranes also contain tiny sub-nanometer pores that are precisely engineered to improve separation performance.

This combination allows the membranes to selectively allow aliphatic molecules to pass while retaining aromatics much more effectively than earlier membrane technologies.

Excellent Results in Laboratory Tests

The researchers first tested three different membrane designs called COF-Me, COF-But, and COF-Hex using a synthetic mixture containing ten different hydrocarbons.

The results were impressive.

The percentage of aliphatic hydrocarbons collected after filtration reached:

  • 88.2% using COF-Me

  • 93.9% using COF-But

  • 94.2% using COF-Hex

As the alkyl chains became longer, the membranes became increasingly effective at rejecting aromatic compounds while allowing desirable aliphatic hydrocarbons to pass through.

This demonstrated that carefully adjusting the membrane's chemistry could significantly improve its performance.

Testing Real Crude Oil

Laboratory mixtures are useful, but real crude oil is much more complicated.

To prove the technology could work under practical conditions, the researchers tested the membranes using undiluted Arabian Light crude oil without heating it.

The results were even more encouraging.

The original crude oil contained 54.5% aliphatic hydrocarbons.

After passing through the first membrane stage, this increased to 92.0%.

After a second membrane stage, the aliphatic concentration rose to an impressive 96.1%.

At the same time, the membranes successfully rejected large amounts of aromatic compounds, including benzene-based molecules, naphthalenes, and larger polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

These results demonstrate that the membranes can perform highly selective separations even with extremely complex crude oil mixtures.

Ready for Industrial Scale

Many promising laboratory technologies fail because they cannot be manufactured economically.

The researchers addressed this challenge by developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process capable of producing continuous membrane sheets.

Using an electric field-assisted deposition technique, they successfully produced membrane sheets measuring:

  • 50 meters (164 feet) long

  • 0.3 meters (1 foot) wide

This shows that the technology can potentially be manufactured on the large scale required by commercial oil refineries.

The team also built industrial-style spiral-wound membrane modules similar to those already used in water purification and chemical processing.

Huge Energy Savings

Perhaps the most exciting finding was the dramatic reduction in energy consumption.

Traditional distillation typically requires between 50 and 200 megajoules (MJ) of energy per barrel of crude oil.

The new membrane system required only about 20.7 MJ per barrel during pilot-scale testing.

Even more importantly, the researchers note that this figure is conservative because it does not yet include pressure-energy recovery systems that could reduce energy use even further.

The membrane modules also operated continuously for more than 250 hours, demonstrating excellent stability during long-term operation.

Challenges Still Remain

Although the technology is highly promising, there are still challenges before it becomes common in oil refineries.

Like many filtration systems, the membranes gradually experienced fouling, where unwanted materials accumulated on the surface and reduced flow over time.

Fortunately, this decline was reversible, and normal cleaning restored membrane performance.

Researchers also hope to further improve the membranes so they can separate even narrower groups of hydrocarbons or eventually isolate individual chemical compounds using multiple membrane stages.

A Cleaner Future for Oil Refining

This breakthrough represents one of the most significant advances in oil separation technology in years. By replacing energy-hungry heating processes with highly selective membrane filtration, refineries could dramatically reduce fuel consumption, operating costs, and carbon emissions.

If future development continues successfully, these advanced COF membranes could help reshape the global refining industry, making the production of fuels and petrochemicals more sustainable without sacrificing performance. While more testing is still needed before widespread commercial adoption, the results suggest that the future of oil refining may rely less on massive furnaces and more on precisely engineered molecular filters.

Reference: Li Cao et al, Scalable fabrication of COF membranes for aliphatic/aromatic separation of crude oil, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.aea0869

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