The Great Refinery Run
Guide crude oil through a real refinery, from pump jack to tanker, in a short educational browser game by a chemical engineer.
Official site fuelingcuriosity.com, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked as “Play The Great Refinery Run” from the official Fueling Curiosity site, whose author is Taylor Bloomquist.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleasedFree
Runs in a desktop or mobile browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About The Great Refinery Run
A free, short educational browser game that follows crude oil from the well to the customer. Most steps are small minigames, several built on a physics engine: pump crude to the refinery, zap salt and water out in the desalter, pick a product path in the distillation tower, then work through hydrotreating, alkylation, reforming, the vacuum tower, coking or catalytic cracking, blend gasoline to octane and vapour-pressure specs, and choose how to ship it, from tanker truck to pipeline. Fun-fact slides explain the chemistry along the way, and a “Just the Facts” mode shows them without the game. The developer, Taylor Bloomquist, is a chemical engineer who manages logistics at a refinery in Texas and made the game to explain the job to their kids, according to the Show HN post. In that post the developer says they are not a software developer and relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot and Gemini) to help write what became a 9,000-line single-page app in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with Matter.js for the physics. It is a companion to the developer's picture book Fueling Curiosity: The ABCs of Refining; the game itself is free, with no ads or sign-up.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn the Show HN post the developer says they are not a software developer by trade and relied heavily on LLMs, naming Claude, Copilot and Gemini, to help write the code. Once the main script grew large, the developer had the models answer with find-and-replace patches instead of full file rewrites, which, per the post, truncated code and broke the JavaScript. The post does not say which product each name refers to (for example, whether Copilot means GitHub Copilot) or how the work was split; Copilot and Gemini are kept in this text only.
A non-programmer working with several LLMs, per the Show HN post. The developer describes the problems solved along the way: forcing the models to output patch-style edits once the script was large, fitting Matter.js rigid bodies inside round, responsive CSS containers, taming iOS Safari's touch behaviour without breaking mouse scrolling, and writing teardown functions to stop timers and physics bodies from leaking between phases, since the game uses no framework and keeps a global state object.
- Engine / framework
- None (vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with Matter.js for 2D physics)
- Languages
- JavaScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to help write the code.”Verification notes: AI use, code size, Matter.js, the free/no-ads statement and the Texas refinery job from the developer's Show HN post of 11 Mar 2026 (Hacker News user fuelingcurious, whose profile mentions a refinery in Corpus Christi). The post links fuelingcuriosity.com/game, and the site and game page name Taylor Bloomquist as author, so the account is taken to be the developer's; the post itself is unsigned. No pronouns are used for the developer because the sources give none. Game phases from the game page; Matter.js 0.19.0 is loaded from a CDN on the page. “Copilot” and “Gemini” are not recorded as tools because the developer does not say which products are meant. The post had 127 points and 55 comments on 3 Nov 2026 (observed; not a metric). The release date is not stated; the game was public by the Show HN date. Team size is not stated. The book's Amazon ratings are not game ratings and are not recorded.
Development history
The developer shares the game on Hacker News as a Show HN, describing how it was built with LLMs by a non-programmer.
DeveloperHacker News (fuelingcurious)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
The game is free, with no ads or sign-up (per the developer); the companion book is sold separately on Amazon.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
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Not currently ranked.
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Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Great Refinery Run: A Fueling Curiosity Game Fueling Curiosity (Taylor Bloomquist) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Oil Refinery STEM Activities, Book & Game | Fueling Curiosity Fueling Curiosity | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Show HN: I built a refinery simulator game to explain job to my kids Hacker News (fuelingcurious) | Social post | Mar 11, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) Fueling Curiosity | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
