lit a candle 7h agoMy dad worked at a refinery for thirty years and he just called me when he saw this, said Sidorov's column designs were the reason his plant cut gas use in the nineties. I'd only seen a clip of him explaining it once and didn't understand half of it but my dad did.
Their story
Georgy Sidorov was a Russian engineer, inventor and professor at Ufa State Petroleum Technological University whose energy-saving methods for separating crude oil and producing cleaner motor fuels were put to work at refineries across Russia and neighbouring countries. Over a career of almost four decades he wrote more than 260…
Georgy Sidorov was a Russian engineer, inventor and professor at Ufa State Petroleum Technological University whose energy-saving methods for separating crude oil and producing cleaner motor fuels were put to work at refineries across Russia and neighbouring countries. Over a career of almost four decades he wrote more than 260 scientific works, held 44 inventions and received state prizes from Russia, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. He died on 17 October 2026, aged 65.
Georgy Markelovich Sidorov was born on 21 January 1961 in the village of Tashtamak in the Aurgazinsky District of the Bashkir ASSR. His father, Markel Fyodorovich Sidorov, was a farm machinery operator honoured with the Order of Lenin, and his mother, Vera Yegorovna, worked on a collective farm. He graduated with honours from the Sterlitamak chemical technology college in 1980 and from the Ufa Oil Institute in 1985, qualifying as a mechanical engineer for chemical production machinery.
After three years at the Ufa rubber products plant, where he rose to head a section building non-standard equipment, he returned to his old institute in 1988. There he worked his way up from engineer to leading researcher, completed postgraduate and doctoral studies, and defended his candidate dissertation in 1993 under Professor A. A. Kondratyev. His doctoral dissertation of 1999 dealt with energy-saving fractionation of petroleum mixtures using complex columns with partially coupled flows, the field that defined his work.
He then spent several years in industry, as deputy chief engineer for technology and development at the Kaustik chemical works in Sterlitamak, as a project manager at the Ufa transformer plant and as deputy director of the Kaskad engineering centre. In 2012 he became a professor in the university's Department of Oil and Gas Technology, where he taught until the end of his life and supervised candidates of science and master's students.
His research on high-octane petrol with improved environmental properties brought him the State Prize of Bashkortostan in 2013 and the Russian Government Prize in Science and Technology in 2015. He was named an Honoured Inventor of Bashkortostan in 2004, won the State Prize of Tatarstan in 2019 and was awarded the Order of Salavat Yulaev in 2021, along with Gazprom and Ledentsov prizes.
The university announced that he died on 17 October 2026. The cause of death was not made public. A farewell was held on Monday 19 October, and the university described his contribution to science and to the training of engineers as enormous.
Biography adapted from Russian Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ufa State Petroleum Technological University death announcement via NTA-Privolzhye (18 October 2026); Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Bashkortostan; Bashkortos.
Photos
1Georgy Sidorov at the Tatarstan State Prize ceremony, February 2020
by People Forever
same, my uncle in Ufa says every engineer there studied his papers