Upgrading of residues in non-catalytic and slurry-type catalytic batch reactors
Date
2019-04-30
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Abstract
As the demand for petroleum products is steadily increasing, heavy oils are playing a bigger role in providing the supply required to meet the demand. However, heavy, unconventional crudes need to first be upgraded to more useful light fractions. While upgrading has a deep history with extensive literature, the goal of this work is to investigate the use of several novel catalysts and process configurations to enhance upgrading of residue fractions. In this work, upgrading of various residue feedstocks via thermal cracking and hydrocracking was performed in an autoclave. The overall objective was to maximize the liquid fraction and quality in terms of viscosity and °API gravity. A variety of techniques such as gas chromatography (GC) were employed to provide more insight to results. The following topics were addressed in the thesis: effect of morphology on the hydrocracking performance of a zeolite-based catalyst, the hydrocracking performance of a novel Ni-Mo supported drill cuttings catalyst, an investigation into the potential removal of the vacuum distillation unit in a typical oil refinery, and a kinetic modelling of atmospheric and vacuum residues to determine the effect of maltene composition on the kinetics of the thermal cracking reactions. It was found that a fibre form zeolite catalyst performed better than a particle form, suggesting that morphology plays an important role during hydrocracking. Drill cuttings promoted in-house with Ni-Mo resulted in improved hydrocracking performance. A direct comparison between thermal cracking of Arabian atmospheric and vacuum residues showed an advantage of direct upgrading of atmospheric residue over the traditional use of a vacuum distillation unit followed by upgrading. Use of an AR-derived kinetic model to predict experimental data from catalytic thermal cracking of VR resulted in significant error, suggesting that composition of the liquid fraction plays an important role in the kinetics of catalytic thermal cracking.
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Keywords
thermal cracking, vacuum residue, hydrocracking, atmospheric residue, kinetic modelling, drill cuttings
Citation
Kaminski, T. (2019). Upgrading of residues in non-catalytic and slurry-type catalytic batch reactors (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.