Upgrading of a Visbroken Vacuum Residue by Adsorption and Catalytic Steam Gasification of the Adsorbed Components

Date
2014-01-29
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Abstract
Unconventional oil is set to play an increasingly important role in world oil supply, where Canadian reserves are going to play a key role in the global market. The bitumen associated to these reserves typically contains more than 50% vacuum residue, thus developing new and less costly processing ideas is necessary. The present work focuses on a new process consisting of the improvement of Athabasca visbroken residue stability via adsorption using an in-house material, followed by low temperature catalytic steam gasification of the adsorbed material. A bench-scale setup was designed and built, and techniques such as P-value, thermal gravimetric analysis, and gas chromatography were used for products characterization. Results indicate that adsorption doesn’t seem to improve the visbroken residue, however an alternative path performing catalytic steam cracking instead shows an extra ~20% conversion of the feed, still maintaining a stable product. On the other hand, Catalytic steam gasification was achieved at low temperatures (560 ºC), with high production of hydrogen for the sorbcats tested, thus making possible an alternative path for the visbroken residue processing.
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Keywords
Engineering--Chemical, Engineering--Petroleum
Citation
Carbognani, L. (2014). Upgrading of a Visbroken Vacuum Residue by Adsorption and Catalytic Steam Gasification of the Adsorbed Components (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28596