Rude Crude

My dad used to use a phrase that stuck with me: rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.

This isn’t something he made up, but rather a description that arose during the 60s and 70s in the US, probably beginning in military circles. Eventually, Steve Martin used the phrase in a movie we both saw in 1984 called All of Me, and I guess it stuck with both of us from that moment forward.

While crude can be a great adjective, amplifying rude and adding a really nice staccato in this case, it can also be used as a noun. If someone uses it this way, it’s almost always short for crude oil.

What’s crude oil?

Here’s what I said not too long ago in It’s Not Made of Dinosaurs (spoiler!):

What isn’t up for debate is that every kid eventually learns that crude oil—you know, the stuff they use to make gasoline—is made of dinosaurs.

What a cool lie to tell kids to get them interested in the oil industry, I guess!

Oil, why you gotta be so boring?

When oil comes out of the ground, it is pretty much always called crude, although there are several different types of crude oil. Theoretically, with enough refinement, all of it can end up as jet fuel or plastic or whatever you want, but because of the relative cost differences in processing, lighter and heavier crudes are normally divided up and used for different things.

Globally, lighter crude is more valuable (or expensive, if you prefer) than heavy crude, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to pull only light crude out of the ground. Each has its own advantages and sets of issues.

Heavier means denser, so it might seem like this type of crude is the most valuable sort across the board. However, it’s not more energy-dense, which means that more gunk has to be taken out and turned into leftovers like asphalt:

Light crude, by contrast, is relatively easy to refine. This stuff ends up becoming naphtha—the stuff that becomes gasoline—and plastics.