Alchemy
A few hours later.
My father and my uncle had erected the Fractionating Column and were in the thick of the piping work.
“Sanha! Come here and hold this pipe support!”
“Yes, sir!”
I rushed over and braced the steel pipe with both hands where my uncle pointed.
“No, not like that. The angle’s off. Like this!”
My uncle twisted my hands and locked the pipe into place.
My father was tightening the threaded joint with a pipe wrench while we did it.
“Okay, it’s fixed. Next!”
No words were necessary.
The two of them were in perfect sync.
With a single gesture, a single glance, they knew exactly what the other wanted.
As for me...
“Sanha, the 19-millimeter socket wrench.”
“Nineteen millimeters? Hold on.”
“Not that one, the one next to it!”
My uncle reached out and picked it up himself.
“Weren’t you the one who got into Harvard Engineering?”
“...I’m in economics.”
“Tsk. What good is that? A man needs a trade.”
At least inside this warehouse, my uncle was right.
I pouted, then swallowed it back down.
My major wasn’t drilling for oil, refining it, or selling it; it was making money from the oil money those things produced.
Just you wait. I’ll multiply the money from this oil several times over.
As I was thinking about the stocks, real estate, auctions, mines, and coins I’d need to keep my eye on in the years ahead,
—hisssss! Fwoosh!
My father lit the burner on the heater with a mixture of scrap tire shreds and diesel fuel.
Blue flames and yellow flames took turns licking upward, beginning to heat the boiler.
The needle on the temperature gauge at the top of the heater slowly climbed.
“Sanha, roll one crude oil drum over to the heater.”
“Yes, sir!”
At my father’s command, I rolled a drum over.
My uncle connected the hand pump and began pushing the crude oil into the internal tank of the heater.
I could see the black liquid slowly flowing down the hose.
The thermometer climbed: 50 degrees, 70, 100...
My mother watched the pressure gauge attached to the bottom of the fractionating column and said, “Pressure at 1.2 bar. Normal.”
“Good. Keep it rising.”
Once it passed 120 degrees, I started to hear the bubbling boil inside the heater.
My uncle shouted, “Crude oil boiling begun! Vapor confirmed! Jo-won-sseo!”
And then white vapor began to rise through the inside of the column.
My father cracked open Valve 1 a little.
“Reached 150 degrees. First fraction is coming out.”
A nearly transparent liquid began to flow out in a thin stream and collect in a small drum.
A sharp, acidic smell spread through the warehouse.
“Sanha, open the ventilation. If you breathe in naphtha vapor, your head’ll split.”
“Yessir!”
Who was I to disobey safety, of all things? I hurried to throw the back door wide open.
And then it happened.
Hisssss—!
From the lower section of the fractionating column, a sudden burst of white vapor belched out.
“Pressure’s spiking! 2.5 bar!”
My mother shouted.
My father’s face hardened.
My uncle rushed over and tried to turn the valve, but the steam was too hot to touch.
“The safety valve isn’t working right! Gloves! Where are the gloves!”
“Here!”
I flung over a pair of leather gloves.
My uncle shoved them on and wrenched the valve around with all his strength.
“We need to lower the temperature first!”
My father ran over with a fire extinguisher.
Whooshhhhhh—!
He blasted the burner with suppressant, and the flames died.
But the heater was already roaring hot inside, and the crude oil kept boiling like mad.
The pressure needle crossed 3.0 bar.
Then my father said, calmly, “Sanha, take your mother and get outside.”
“What? Then what about you?”
“Your uncle and I will handle this.”
“No, it’s dangerous!”
“Are you going to disobey me?!”
My father barked the words.
In that moment, I looked into his eyes.
There was no fear there, only confidence.
...That look.
I’d seen it before.
I’d seen it on the legendary investment experts at Wall Street, the ones said to have climbed from the lowest clerk to the chairman’s seat.
It was the very same look.
“...Okay.”
I took my mother’s hand and ran out of the warehouse.
Outside, we held our breath and waited.
Ten seconds, twenty, thirty...
And then,
BOOM!
A massive explosion rang out from inside the warehouse.
“Father!”
I tried to dash back inside, but my mother grabbed me.
“Wait. Trust your dad.”
“...”
I couldn’t understand her composure.
Right then—
Creak.
The warehouse door opened, and my father and uncle walked out, their faces blackened with soot.
“Whew. I thought we were done for.”
“My brother-in-law’s not dead yet, after all. To think you’d dump the cooling water in at that exact moment.”
“When pressure runs wild, cooling is the answer. The first thing I bought after hearing our son’s plan was cooling water, remember?”
The two of them were cackling as if nothing had happened.
Watching them, I realized it.
My father and uncle were true experts at this.
Just as I had felt pride while moving hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street, they too had their own pride.
I waited until my father and uncle had washed up, then followed them back into the warehouse.
This time, we replaced the safety valve with a new one and doubled the pressure sensors.
My father clapped once.
“Let’s do it again.”
Time passed, and the thermometer reached 180 degrees.
“Close Valve 1 and open Valve 2.”
My father switched the valves quickly.
“From here on out, we’re in the gasoline range. Let’s collect only the ones with boiling points between 150 and 200 degrees.”
Yellowish liquid condensed in the middle of the fractionating column and dripped down.
My uncle opened the cooling-water valve on the heat exchanger.
“Cooling water on! Condensation temperature holding at 40 degrees, okay~”
The hot vapor passed through the cooling coil and turned into liquid.
The fluid flowing out of the outlet was a pale lemon color.
This was the first gasoline.
“Finally!”
Unlike my excited self, my father remained calm.
He held the gasoline up to the light, smelled it, rubbed it between his fingers, and then said, “Hm. Garbage.”
My father delivered a ruthless verdict.
“Look at the color. It’s too cloudy. This is mixed with naphtha and heavy oil. Put that into an engine and you’ll ruin the whole thing.”
He lowered the heating temperature by 3 degrees and cut the distillation speed in half.
“We’ll get less volume, but we’ll pull out only the clean stuff. Quality is life.”
“Exactly. One bad batch and all the regulars disappear.”
My uncle nodded.
Meanwhile, my mother checked the tray temperatures of the fractionating column one by one and said, “Tray 1 at 170 degrees, Tray 2 at 165, Tray 3 at 160... The temperature gradient is normal.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
About ten minutes later, liquid began flowing again.
This time it was a much clearer, more transparent pale yellow.
My father caught it in a beaker and checked it.
Held to the light, it was nearly transparent.
The smell was the unmistakable scent of gasoline.
Rubbed between the fingers, the viscosity felt just right.
“Now we’re talking. What about the octane measurement?”
“We can’t do that here. But we can roughly estimate it from the specific gravity and evaporation rate.”
My uncle took out a hydrometer and dipped it into the liquid.
“Hmm, with this, I’d say an API gravity of 60. Octane around 85 to 87, maybe?”
“That’s regular gas at an ordinary station. Good enough.”
My father gave the final approval.
Cleanly refined gasoline began filling the drum.
...plop! ...plop! ...plop! ...plop! ...plop!
A steady rhythm, a cheerful beat.
I watched my father’s back as he checked the gasoline’s quality.
His work clothes stained with oil, the nape of his neck slick with sweat, his hands thick with calluses.
All of it made me feel insanely proud.
My mother, standing beside me, nudged my ribs.
“Son. Your old man looks cool, doesn’t he?”
“...Yes.”
“Then don’t just stand there like an idiot. Once the temperature goes over 190, switch to Valve 3. From there, we’re in the kerosene range.”
“Ah, yes, ma’am.”
I kept watch on the thermometer, and the instant the needle hit 190, I shouted, “Reached 190 degrees!”
“Switch the valve!”
My father closed Valve 2 and opened Valve 3.
The liquid darkened a shade.
“Once it passes 250, Valve 4. That’s diesel from there on.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
My father and uncle were still perfectly in sync.
Time went by.
The temperature kept rising, and the valves kept changing over.
Naphtha, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, heavy oil...
From a single drum of crude, several kinds of oil were separated out in sequence.
“Once we’ve pulled the diesel, collect the rest as heavy oil. We can sell it as fuel for factory boilers.”
My father opened the final valve.
A thick, blackish liquid flowed out.
“We’ve almost got everything out.”
The crude inside the heater had nearly run dry.
What remained at the end was only a high-viscosity residue, almost like asphalt.
“Let’s calculate the final yield.”
My uncle took out a notebook and calculator.
“From 100 liters of crude... 10 liters of naphtha, 40 liters of gasoline, 15 liters of kerosene, 20 liters of diesel, 10 liters of heavy oil. Total recovered: 95 liters. Yield’s 95 percent. Not bad. That’s about what a big refinery gets, too.”
My father nodded in satisfaction.
My mother pushed the empty drums aside and began attaching labels to the full ones.
“Naphtha,” “Gasoline,” “Kerosene,” “Diesel,” “Heavy Oil”...
After hours of work, the corner of the warehouse stood lined with drums full of all kinds of oil.
I glanced at my father.
“So what do we do now?”
“What do you mean, what do we do?”
My father answered in a tone even more dependable than a regressor’s.
“We sell it.”
At that very moment, noisy sounds came from outside the gas station.
Honk-honk—
One of my father’s trucker regulars, a man who’d been coming for twenty years, was honking his horn and waving out the window.