Laboratory and commercial investigation of ebullated bed residue hydrocracking performance during processing of Urals crude vacuum resid and its blends with vacuum gas oil and atmospheric residue

This study focuses on investigating the conversion behaviour of vacuum residue and blends with heavy VGO (480-540°C) and atmospheric residue (340°C+), three fractions originating from the same Russian export blend crude oil (REBCO), in a laboratory ebullated bed hydrocracking pilot plant unit and in the LUKOIL Neftohim Burgas commercial H-OilRC hydrocracker. It was found that the vacuum residue conversion was 1.7 times as high as that of the VGO at the same operating conditions in both laboratory and in the commercial H-OilRC hydrocracking unit. No increase in the sediment content of the atmospheric residue product, obtained during hydrocracking of the lighter feeds, was observed. It was found that the vacuum residue H-Oil hydrocracking is best described by 1.5 order kinetics. This study showed that co-processing of distillate material (mainly vacuum gas oil) is an option to increase capacity of an existing H-OilRC residue hydrocracker while also improving the VGO product quality without adversely impacting sediment levels in the unconverted residue product. [Received: February 2, 2017; Accepted: September 21, 2017]