Cleaner technology evolutions for refineries

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)