A process and apparatus to extract and recover heavy metals and sulfur from crude oil (3) or petroleum fuel products consisting of the steps of emulsifying (4) the crude oil with an emulsifying agent (5), adding a leach solution (14, 17) to the emulsified crude oil and leaching (7) the emulsified crude oil at elevated temperature and pressure to give a leached emulsified crude oil. The leach solution may be acid or alkali. A proportion of the leach solution (16) is extracted for recovering heavy metals. There can also be a microwave hydro-treating step (9) using hydrogen gas (10) at a temperature below 220 DEG C to ensure there is no quality degradation in the crude feed to produce a desulfurised crude oil (20) and a hydrogen sulphide by-product and recovering sulfur from the hydrogen sulphide by-product.
