Chemical Manufacturing Petroleum Refining

Chemical plants use the raw materials produced in the refinery to make the chemicals that are the basis of products like plastics and synthetic rubber. Chemicals made by these processes are used In the clothing and textile industry, automobile industry, pharmaceutical and medical industry, computer and electronic appliance industry, and in paint, fertilizers, and so on. Chemical plants specialize in the large-scale production of chemical feedstocks and products made from the ever-versatile hydrocarbons. Technicians may work inside a chemical plant manufacturing a specific chemical and be totally unaware of how and where that chemical product is being used in our complex modern society. 

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Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, sometimes also called polynuclear aromatics, PNA) are a hazardous class of widespread pollutants. The parent structures of the common PAHs are shown in Fig. 4 and the alkylated homologs are generally minor in combustion emissions. PAHs are produced by all natural combustion processes (e.g., wild fires) and from anthropogenic activity such as fossil fuels combustion, biomass burning, chemical manufacturing, petroleum refining, metallurgical processes, coal utilization, tar production, etc. [6,9,15,18, 20,24,131-139]. 

Catalysts for Chemical Industry Applications. The PGMs are widely used as catalysts in chemical manufacturing, petroleum (qv) refining, and electrochemical processing (qv). A number of the most important industrial products manufactured by using PGM catalysts are outlined herein. 

Sulfur is used extensively in making sulfuric acid, the most widely used industrial chemical in the world. It is also used in paper manufacture, petroleum refining, dye production, insecticide synthesis, and fertilizer production, to name a few uses. 

In the chemical engineering domain, neural nets have been appHed to a variety of problems. Examples include diagnosis (66,67), process modeling (68,69), process control (70,71), and data interpretation (72,73). Industrial appHcation areas include distillation column operation (74), fluidized-bed combustion (75), petroleum refining (76), and composites manufacture (77). 

The pollutant ouqiuts from the refining facilities, however, are modest in comparison to the pollutant outputs realized from the consumption of petroleum products by the transportation sector, electric utilities, chemical manufacturers, and other industrial and commercial users. 

According to TRI data, the petroleum refining industry releases (discharges to the air, water, or land without treatment) and transfers (shipped off-site) a total of 482 million pounds of pollutants per year, made up of 103 different chemicals. This represents about 11 % of the total pounds of TRI chemicals released and transferred by all manufacturers in a year. In comparison, the chemical industry generates on the average 2.5 billion pounds per year, accounting for 33% of all releases and transfers. 

Even with direct access to the basic raw materials, the refiners were slow to enter the field. Eventually, in the years leading up to World War II, the refiners began to perceive how their refining operations could be supplemented by petrochemical manufacture. By the start of world War II, they were beginning to compete m earnest with the chemical industiy in petrochemical synthetics markets. Between 1929 and 1941, the byproduct refinery gases consumed by both the chemical and petroleum industries for the purpose of manufacturing chemicals more than doubled, from 38.6 million barrels to 83.4 million barrels. 

Sulfur displays rich and varied chemical behavior, but from the commercial standpoint, sulfuric acid dominates the chemistry of this element. Sulfuric acid is used in every major chemical-related industry fertilizers (60% of annual production), chemical manufacture (6%), petroleum refining (5%), metallurgy (5%), detergents, plastics,... 

Petrochemical recovered oil. Organic chemical manufacturing facilities sometimes recover oil from their organic chemical industry operations. U.S. EPA excluded petrochemical recovered oil from the definition of solid waste when the facility inserts the material into the petroleum-refining process of an associated or adjacent petroleum refinery. Only petrochemical recovered oil that is hazardous because it exhibits the characteristic of ignitability or exhibits the toxicity characteristic for benzene (or both) is eligible for the exclusion. 

The manufacture of fertilizers was discussed in Chapter 14. Phosphate rock is digested with sulfuric acid to convert CaC03 into a more soluble form that contains a higher percentage of phosphorus. Sulfuric acid is used as a catalyst in alkylation reactions, petroleum refining, manufacture of detergents, paints, dyes, and fibers, and other processes. It is also used as the electrolyte in the lead-acid battery that is used in automobiles. Sulfuric acid is an enormously important chemical commodity that it would be hard to do without. 

Used industrially in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, textile chemicals, adhesives, binders, petroleum refining chemicals, fuels, lubricants, coating resins, varnishes, polymerizations, lacquers, agricultural chemicals, cosmetics, ion exchange resins, photographic chemicals, surfactants used in the paper industry and as a flocculation aid. 

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