Refinery 101

What Actually Is a Refinery? A Simple Look at the FlexOnyx Process

When most people hear the word refinery, they imagine a tangle of pipes, chimneys puffing steam, and maybe a vague sense of “complicated science stuff.” And yes, there’s a lot of engineering under the hood—but the basic idea is surprisingly simple. A refinery is really just a giant sorting machine. A very hot, very clever, and very efficient sorting machine.

At FlexOnyx, we’ve taken that tried-and-true idea and applied it to something that’s long been a global headache: waste plastics. Let’s take a look at how our refinery will work—and why it’s going to be a game-changer.

The Basics: From Crude Oil to Useful Products

Traditional refineries take in crude oil and break it down into usable parts. Think of crude oil as a big, messy box of LEGO bricks. Some are tiny, some huge, some oddly shaped—and to build anything useful, you first need to sort and reshape them.

That’s where heat, pressure, and chemistry come in. A refinery breaks crude oil apart into basic building blocks, then rearranges or “refines” them into high-value products like diesel, gasoline, naphtha (used to make new plastics), jet fuel, and more. The process includes distillation (separating by boiling point), cracking (breaking big molecules into smaller ones), and treating (removing unwanted stuff like sulfur or metals).

It’s chemistry, yes—but at its core, it’s just intelligent separation and transformation. Heat, flow, and a bit of industrial choreography.

Now Enter Plastics: The New Feedstock Frontier

Here’s where FlexOnyx gets exciting.

Instead of starting with crude oil, our FlexFeed™ refinery is designed to work with a range of inputs, including solids such as waste plastics.

Plastics are made from fossil fuels in the first place—so, with the right technology, they can be “unmade” and turned back into high-quality fuels and feedstocks. This isn’t just a cool trick—it’s one of the most promising ways to close the loop and create a circular economy for plastics.

So How Does It Actually Work?

Here’s the general flow:

1. Feedstock Preparation:
   Plastics come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of cleanliness. Before entering the main process, they need to be sorted, shredded, and sometimes pretreated to remove things like metal or moisture.
2. Thermal Conversion:
   The prepped plastic enters a high-temperature environment where it’s broken down into simpler hydrocarbon molecules. This is similar to “cracking” in traditional refining but tuned specifically for plastics.
3. Hydrotreatment & Upgrading:
   Those simpler molecules are refined and upgraded using heat and hydrogen. Impurities are removed, and the final product is tailored into useful fuels like jet fuel, ultra-low sulfur diesel, naphtha (for new plastic), and more.
4. Product Separation & Finishing:
   Just like in a traditional refinery, the different products are separated by boiling point or molecular weight, then cleaned up and sent to market.

It’s Not Just Smart—It’s Clean

One of the things we’re most proud of at FlexOnyx is how clean the process really is. Unlike older industrial systems, our refinery is designed as a closed-loop system operating under pressure. That means emissions are largely contained.

And here’s something even rarer in the world of heavy industry: every single output from our process is useful and marketable. There are no waste byproducts to dispose of. What goes in gets transformed into fuel, feedstock, or valuable co-products—nothing gets left behind. That’s not just efficient, it’s revolutionary.

Why It’s So Simple—And Why That Matters

The brilliance of the FlexOnyx approach is that it leans into proven industrial principles. We’re not reinventing the wheel—we’re just using it smarter. The core systems are the same as those used in oil refineries around the world.

What’s different is the feedstock, and that change turns a global problem into a powerful opportunity.

By using waste plastics, we tap into a cheap, abundant, and underutilized resource. And by applying refinery logic, we’re able to produce clean fuels and chemical feedstocks at scale—without the guesswork or inefficiencies of other so-called “advanced recycling” schemes.

The Big Picture: Turning Trash Into Treasure

Our goal at FlexOnyx isn’t just to build another refinery. It’s to prove that plastic waste isn’t a liability—it’s a resource. By combining industrial simplicity with feedstock flexibility, our system transforms what the world throws away into products people still need and use every day.

And the best part? This is a scalable, repeatable process that can be deployed wherever plastic waste piles up and energy demand persists—which, frankly, is just about everywhere.

Refineries don’t have to be mysterious. They’re just carefully designed systems that take messy inputs and turn them into clean, valuable outputs. At FlexOnyx, we’ve taken that principle and pointed it at one of the biggest messes humanity has ever made—plastic waste.