Fuel gas upgrade

The innovative design of different refinery processes while considering the downstream petrochemical industry is an illustration of the realization of refining and 

Refinery Stream Petrochemical Stream Alternative Refinery Use 

Reformate Benzene, toluene, xylenes Gasoline blending 

Butylenes (FCC and delayed coker) Isopropanol, Oligomers MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) Alkylation, MTBE 

Butylenes (FCC and delayed coker) MTBE Alkylation, MTBE 

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Natural Gas Upgrading via Fischer-Tropsch. In the United States, as in other countries, scarcities from World War II revived interest in the synthesis of fuel substances. A study of the economics of Fischer synthesis led to the conclusion that the large-scale production of gasoline from natural gas offered hope for commercial utiHty. In the Hydrocol process (Hydrocarbon Research, Inc.) natural gas was treated with high purity oxygen to produce the synthesis gas which was converted in fluidized beds of kon catalysts (42). 

Landfill gas is produced as a result of organic wastes decomposing in landfill sites. It can be recovered at an inexpensive cost of for direct use as a boiler fuel, converted into electricity with a microturbine or upgraded to a higher value fuel gas. This is a very effective mitigation technology since methane is 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. 

Easy start-up and shutdown Good tolerance for fuel input particle size range High ash fuels can be accepted In-bed catalysts can be applied (tar cracking/gas upgrading) Thermodynamic losses limited Experience with biomass processing Carbon loss with ash... 

High heating-value gas (20 to 35 MJ/m3 or 540 to 940 Btu/ft3) can also be used as fuel gas for gas turbines in IGCC applications, for SNG and hydrogen production, for fuel cell feed, and for chemical and fuel synthesis. However, it does not require as much upgrading and methanation to produce SNG. 

Pyrolysis has a long history in the upgrading of biomass. The dry distillation of hardwood was applied in the early 1990s to produce organic intermediates (methanol and acetic acid), charcoal and fuel gas [3]. Today s processes can be tuned to form char, oil and/or gas, all depending on the temperature and reaction time, from 300 °C and hours, to 400-500 °C and seconds-minutes, to >700 °C and a fraction of a second [3, 19, 23, 24], The process is typically carried out under inert atmosphere. We illustrate the basic chemistry of pyrolysis by focusing on the conversion of the carbohydrate components (Fig. 2.4). The reaction of the lignin will not be covered here but should obviously be considered in a real process. Interested readers could consult the literature, e.g., [25]. Pyrolysis is discussed in more details elsewhere in this book [26],... 

Pyrolysis oil (bio-oil) is produced in fast and flash pyrolysis processes and can be used for indirect co-firing for power production in conventional power plants and potentially as a high energy density intermediate for the final production of chemicals and/or transportation fuels. Gas chromatographic analysis of the liqtrid fraction of pyrolysis products from beech wood is given in Table 3.6 (Demirbas, 2007). Biocmde resrrlts from severe hydrothermal upgrading (HTU) of relatively wet biomass and potentially can be used for the production of materials, chemicals,... 

Natural gas upgrading economics may be affected by additional factors. The increasing use of compressed natural gas (CNG) direcdy as fuel in vehicles provides an alternative market which affects both gas price and value (see Gasoline AND OTHER motor fuels Gas, natural). The hostility of the remote site environment where the natural gas is located may contribute to additional costs, eg, offshore sites require platforms and submarine pipelines. 

The FTC Process is a heavy oil and residuum upgrading process in which the feedstock is thermally cracked to produce distillate and coke, which is gasified to fuel gas (Miyauchi et al., 1981 Miyauchi and Ikeda, 1988). 

Dimersol E is used to upgrade C2 + C3 fuel gas. Co-oligomerization of ethylene and propene leads to a gasoline stream very similar to the Dimersol G product. Mixed butenes are also obtained with Dimersol E (from ethylene dimerization). They can be used in paraffinic alkylation or to make propene through a subsequent cross-metathesis reaction with ethylene. 

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