24 June 2026
An inexpensive, porous polymer membrane helps to separate raw crude oil, without heat or selective coating. Heavy hydrocarbons self-assemble inside the pores to create channels that are likely to be less than 2 nanometres wide, enriching the resulting permeate mix into light, ‘naphtha range’ hydrocarbons with 30% less energy cost and carbon dioxide emissions than conventional distillation.
This is a summary of: Choi, J. et al. Crude oil fractionation by means of mesoporous polyacrylonitrile membranes. Nature 654, 955–962 (2026).
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