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Special Catalytic Reforming Topics
Published in Soni O. Oyekan, Catalytic Naphtha Reforming Process, 2018
Bitumen from oil sands is now being processed globally in high-complexity cracking and coking refineries, and the quality of the unconventional oil determines the processing assets that are required for reliable and profitable refining. The quality of bitumen-derived oils depends on the degree of upgrading of the bitumen via coking and hydrocracking, and the quality of diluents such as condensate, naphtha, and light sweet conventional oils that are added to reduce the viscosity of the bitumen and permit transportation of the oil through pipelines. An Oil Sands article clearly described the processes and nomenclatures such as Dilbit, Synbit, and synthetic crude oils (SCOs) used to differentiate the type of bitumen oils that oil refiners are processing as opportunity oils in their refineries. Mixed products of a diluent or condensate with bitumen are referred to as Dilbit, as shown in Figure 8.1. Heavy sour oils with API gravity in the range of 20–22 and containing greater than 1 weight percent sulfur are typically referred to as Dilbit products.(10) Such opportunity oils are most likely to be more profitably processed in complex refineries that have cracking and coking configurations. Due to the high fraction of heavy components and high sulfur, bitumen oils are not suitable for processing in hydroskimming or simple conventional refineries and have to be upgraded via decoking and hydrocracking processes to produce synthetic crude oils with API gravity in the range of 30–35.
Introduction to Oil Spills and their Clean-up
Published in Ozcan Konur, Petrodiesel Fuels, 2021
There are significant trends that should be noted:In Canadian production, the amount of bitumen being marketed is rapidly increasing. In addition to being sold as a diluted product called ‘Dilbit’, bitumen is also being upgraded into a synthetic crude. Spills of Dilbit have caused concern because some of the unique spill properties that it has shown, namely that once weathered for a period of time, it may sink in fresh water.In North Dakota, the Bakken oil field is currently producing oil and the expansion of this field is quite rapid. This oil is also of concern when spilled as it is very flammable and has caused considerable damage in spills such as the Lac Megantic spill in Quebec.There is a pipeline shortage to transport the above two products and these are increasingly being transported by rail, which also has increased the risk of spills from this source. Spills of oil from trains are believed to pose a higher risk than from pipelines (Frittelli et al., 2014).Pipelines themselves are being built at a very rapid pace and many have been modified to carry products to the North American south rather than carrying other products north. The spills from pipelines have been decreasing in size (Etkin, 2014). It should be noted that the number of pipeline spills might increase as a result of the increasing number of pipelines.The volume and number of spills from tanker vessels has been constantly decreasing over the past 20 years. Tanker spills contribute very little to the spillage in many countries.
The effect of feedstock treatment on the deasphalting process
Published in Petroleum Science and Technology, 2018
Irina Goncharova, Aliya Safiulina, Ismagil Khusnutdinov, Emmanuel Alawode, Galiya Skvortsova
Transportation of natural bitumen and high-viscosity oils to oil refineries presents a serious problem for the production sites (Verma et al. 2017). Currently, this problem is solved in four different ways (de Klerk, Gray, and Zerpa 2014). In the first case, viscosity of the bitumen is significantly reduced due to mixing with the diluent (i.e. conventional oil), so-called “dilbit” is produced (Nimana, Canter, and Kumar 2015). The diluent-oil ratio varies in the range of 25:75–35:65. This method can be applied to small production facilities since the consumption of diluent is very high. Refinery upgrading includes carbon rejection (cracking), hydrogen addition, and separation technologies (distillation, deasphalting). Alternative way is to provide in-situ upgrading of the bitumen (Speight 2013b) by steam injection, in-situ combustion (Kapadia, Kallos, and Gates 2015), electric heating, etc., so that lower boiling lighter products can be produced in the formation under high temperature (and pressure and/or in the presence of catalysts) conditions. One of the promising methods is partial upgrading of bitumen close to the production site. Particularly, solvent deasphalting process should be given more attention to, because energy consumption can be reduced by 30% compared to conventional upgrading techniques (Al-Sabawi, Seth, and de Bruijn 2011). Besides, obtained products (deasphalted oil [DAO]) are of high quality, since they have not been exposed to thermal cracking and all the unnecessary impurities are concentrated in the asphalt phase. Various solvents have been proposed for the deasphalting process: light hydrocarbons (propane, pentane etc.), alcohols (methanol, isopropanol, butanol etc.), ketones (acetone, methylethylketone etc.), chlorinated hydrocarbons (chloroform etc.), carbon dioxide, and some others (Patwardhan 1977; Höucker and Vogelpohl 1987; Das and Butler 1998; Li et al. 2012; Kan et al. 2015; Im et al. 2018). Some scientist proposed to use solvents with additives in order to increase the selectivity of the process and yield of DAO.