This division includes the transformation of crude petroleum and coal into usable products. The dominant process is petroleum refining, which involves the separation of crude petroleum into component products through such techniques as cracking and distillation. This division includes the manufacture of gases such as ethane, propane and butane as products of petroleum refineries.

This division also includes the manufacture for own account of characteristic products (e.g. coke, butane, propane, petrol, kerosene, fuel oil etc.) as well as processing services (e.g. custom refining).

Petroleum coke, abbreviated coke or petcoke, is a final carbon-rich solid material that derives from oil refining, and is one type of the group of fuels referred to as cokes. Petcoke is the coke that, in particular, derives from a final cracking process—a thermo-based chemical engineering process that splits long chain hydrocarbons of petroleum into shorter chains—that takes place in units termed coker units. 

Stated succinctly, coke is the “carbonization product of high-boiling hydrocarbon fractions obtained in petroleum processing (heavy residues)”. Petcoke is also produced in the production of synthetic crude oil (syncrude) from bitumen extracted from Canada’s oil sands and from Venezuela’s Orinoco oil sands.