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This lesson covers cracking — the process of breaking long-chain hydrocarbons into shorter, more useful molecules — as required by the Edexcel GCSE Chemistry specification (1CH0). You need to know why cracking is necessary, the two main methods (thermal and catalytic), and how to write balanced equations for cracking reactions.
As you learned in previous lessons, fractional distillation of crude oil produces a mismatch between supply and demand:
Cracking solves this problem by converting long-chain hydrocarbons (for which there is low demand) into shorter-chain hydrocarbons (for which there is high demand), along with useful alkenes.
Cracking always produces a mixture of:
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