Argonne, Amoco see bonanza in heavy crude
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Argonne National Laboratory and Amoco Oil Co. have joined forces in a cooperative effort to develop new and improve existing technologies for converting low-grade byproducts of crude oil refining into useful fuels. These byproducts or resids are the low-grade tars and other chemicals left over after crude oil is refined. Current resid upgrade techniques depend heavily on catalytic hydroprocessing which is prone to fouling, thus reducing the efficiency of the process. The goal of current research is to improve current resid upgrade technology in order to increase yields of fuel-grade resid by a factor of about 50%. Over the next three years, the Argonne and Amoco researchers plan to study these catalytic reactions in an attempt to understand how coke forms and grows in order to develop technologies that can more effectively identify and remove carbon, sulfur compounds and other chemicals in heavy resid material.Keywords:
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It was established that olefin cracker and gasification technologies provide solutions to today's refineries by marketing unwanted, heavy, high sulfur, TAN materials though environmentally benign, highly valuable productions. To a refinery, these technologies offer reaction operations like hydrocracking, catalytic reforming etc. However, they convert the various fractions of oils including heavy, high sulfur, TAN oils to more valuable primary petrochemicals, hydrogen, power, and energy. Due to high investment and maintenance costs of these two processes their applications are limited to refineries. However, in recent years when the environmental legislations on fuel qualities and emissions demand a complete disposal of bottom fractions into sustainable products, while ensuring a steady economic gain, integration of these two technologies to refineries seems to be the most promising option. Economic justification is achieved in the following ways. A high valued product slate consisting of polymer grade olefins (ethylene, propylene), hydrogen, transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel), power and energy with significantly lower emissions is resulted from complete bottom of barrel disposal. No heavy products, fuel oils, residues are produced having lower value than crude oils. Today's refinery should ideally employ a limited number of selective technologies: crude distillation, hydrotreating, olefin cracking, resid processing (e.g. solvent deasphalting, delayed coking), integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). Use of advanced process integration tools and development of process technologies particularly in the areas of olefin cracking, IGCC offer additional prospects of economic growth in refineries. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (Glasgow, Scotland 7/10-14/2005).
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Addition of atmospheric residuum hydrotreating with fluid catalytic cracking or delayed coking appear to be most attractive for converting a typical light crude refinery to heavy crude operation. Examination of seven alternative approaches for accomplishing this conversion shows a range in economic results that illustrate the general conclusions but require specific examination for each refinery to determine its optimum choice. During 1978-1982, many refiners initiated projects to permit processing lower quality heavier crudes with the capability for converting residuum to transportation fuel products. A substantial price differential between light and heavy crude and a low residual fuel oil value provided a twofold incentive for these projects. Recently, crude price differentials have shrunk, and high-sulfur residual fuel oil values have risen almost to crude prices. Some analysts believe that this is a temporary market situation and that incentives will be restored within five years as heavy crudes become more available and outlets for high-sulfur fuel oil become more limited. Various processing schemes are possible for use in converting a typical light crude refinery. Several of these are considered in a screening evaluation.
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Upgrading technology for heavy residue in which sulfur and metals are concentrated is getting more important since crude oils tend to be heavier. In this paper, first characteristics of heavy crude oil are explained, then technologies of residue desulfurization and fluid catalytic cracking in refinery are introduced. Especially, HS-FCC technology, which Nippon oil Co., Saudi Arabia and JCCP are under developing, is focused on as a new technology. Finally, the effect of heavy crude oil on the production of clean fuels is discussed and a promising way to produce clean fuels from heavy residue is proposed.
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This first of two articles examines how the refining industry has processed the bottom of the barrel over the years and where the industry is headed at the turn of the century. The second article will compare coking and hydroprocessing in a case study.
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Abstract Future worldwide crude supply projections indicate a shortage of high-quality, low-sulfur crudes. Figure 1 shows that the sulfur, gravity, and l000+°F material will continue to degrade the quality of crude oil for U.S. refiners [1]. The availability of more plentiful, heavier high-sulfur crudes creates several problems for the refiner. First, processing facilities are required to remove sulfur from the various fractions in the crude, and secondly, conversion facilities are required to convert the concentrations of 1000 + °F resid to more valuable products such as gasoline and distillates. In a conventional refinery, the vacuum resid (1000 + °F) is sold either as residual fuel or as asphalt, or it is thermally processed in cokers to produce coker liquids for further processing, and low-value petroleum coke. Because of the reduced markets for residual fuel, asphalt, and coke, refiners have had to install expensive conversion facilities to deal with the larger volumes of vacuum resids from poorer quality crudes.
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The authors are concerned with Exxon's Fluid and Flexicoking processes which allow the refiner to convert the bottom of the crude barrel to clean products. This article primarily discusses enhancement of liquid yields from both processes and reduction of low-Btu gas from Flexicoking. Also discussed are recent advances in coking technology, which could make these processes more attractive. Flexicoking is an integrated coking/gasification process for upgrading heavy feedstocks. The process converts these feeds to a 99% yield of fuel gas, naphtha, middle distillates, heavy gas oil, and a low-sulfur coke gas. The remaining 1% is petroleum coke containing metals and other ash components present in the feed. 6 refs.
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Venezuela has approximately 28% of the world reserves of heavy crude oil and natural bitumen. The amount of future recoverable oil reserves is estimated to be 44 GM{sup 3}. The Venezuelan oil industry is now facing the challenge of introducing this cheap source of energy into a fuel market that has grown in environmentally restrictive legislation affecting the refining industry. This challenge calls for the use of the right type of resid upgrading technology, that both will improve its environmental performance and ensure its economic and financial viability. This paper describes two technologies to reduce high sulfur fuel oil production while incorporating more heavy crude into refineries.
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Oil reserves
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An integrated industrial system has been formed in (China's) petroleum refining industry. Although the expectation of (China's) demands for petroleum products is to be increased at a higher speed before 2020, the severe situation is seen with the problems concerning the shortage of crude resources, low gradation of product quality, the conspicuous conflicts of market supply versus demands for petrochemical light oils, and environmental protection, etc. To speed up the development of China's petroleum refining industry, suggested routes of refining processes are configured as: (1) to optimize the refining processing by focusing on heavy oil upgrading combining with (China's) practice; (2) production of transportation fuels and petrochemical raw materials which can not be replaced by other resources currently; (3) to keep catalytic cracking playing the backbone role for producing final product oils; (4) to speed up the development of hydrocracking to achieve the integration of petroleum refining and petrochemical production; (5) combination of the pre-treatments of raw materials, new processes of catalytic cracking with post-treatments to improve the quality of final products; (6) reuse of treated waste water, the control of exhausted SO_x to alleviate the air pollution, etc.
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Shale oil is notable for its high nitrogen content and for large amounts of unsaturated and metallic contaminants. However, although expensive to refine, shale oil can be upgraded to specification transportation fuels using commercially available petroleum processing technology. The key is an effective initial hydrotreating step in which most of the contaminants are removed. The syncrude thus produced can then be refined in petroleum refineries using conventional technology such as hydrocracking, catalytic cracking, and catalytic reforming to give specification transportation fuels. This paper discusses upgrading options, the properties of fuels from shale oil, and reviews Chevron's plans for commercial development.
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Saber Refinery embarked upon major residual oil upgrading project in an effort to convert heavy atmospheric resids into gasoline and other marketable products. Selection of resid hydroprocessing as an HOC feed preparation unit was necessary for removal of impurities which include organic metallic compounds, nitrogen and sulfur, while enhancing feedstock crackability.
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