Hello, I'm Lawrence Knight. Welcome to Business Daily.

In our latest exploration of the chemistry of the world economy, I'll be looking at the element behind acids.

Why it makes them so hard to handle and so harmful to human flesh.

And then it felt like my face had been put in a furnace. My skin just started

melting away. But the vicious power of acids also makes them essential to industry. We use

them to obtain the minerals that build our world, the fertilizers that feed the planet, and the

fuels that propel our vehicles.

And most acids, though not all, depend on the positive charge of the simplest of the chemical elements.

I'm talking, of course, about hydrogen.

That's the sound you can hear of the alarms going off at the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in Scotland,

although you'll be glad to hear that it's actually just their weekly test.

And I'm here with Graham.

Hello, I'm Graham Birch. I'm the refinery technical manager here at the Petroinios Grangemouth Refinery. And acids play a critical role in

oil refining, specifically in the process of cracking. Correct. So we're looking to break up a whole

load of heavy wax type material and break it into more manageable smaller chunks. So what we're talking

about here is here at the refinery you have crude oil coming out of the

ground and that's kind of a soup of all kinds of hydrocarbons, these long chains of carbon

with hydrogen around them and a lot of those are kind of bit too long or the wrong kind of

shape for what you want to do with them.

That's correct.

You can get anywhere between 30 and 50% of the crude

is very heavy material that you can't get into either a diesel engine or a jet engine. So

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