Fuel Products Refinery

There is a wide range of conversion levels. The term maximum conversion type has no precise definition but is often used to describe a level of conversion, where there is no net fuel oil manufactured. A fuel products refinery with specialities may manufacture lubricating oils, asphalts, greases, solvents, waxes and chemical feed stocks in addition to the primary fuel products. The number and diversity of products will naturally vary from one refinery to another. Refineries produce chemical feed stocks for sale to the chemical affiliates and do not have responsibility for the manufacture of chemical products directly. Both operations may be carried out at the same physical location but the corporate product responsibilities are usually separate. 

A hydroskimming refinery lends itself to locations where the market demands for the major fuel products (gasoline, gas oil, and residual fuel oil) approximate the quantities of these products obtainable by distillation from the available crudes. A typical hydroskimming refinery would include the following ... 

The refinery catered for both fuels and chemicals production. Chemicals were mainly produced in the LTFT oil refinery and from the Fischer-Tropsch aqueous product. Transportation fuels were produced mainly in the HTFT oil refinery, although some fuels were also produced from LTFT syncrude. The ease of refining and the quality of the fuels from HTFT syncrude are better than those from LTFT, which is better suited to chemicals (rather than fuels) production. 

The design intent was mainly to produce transportation fuels, yet some chemicals were co-produced, rather than being converted into fuels. For example, the refinery design of the aqueous product refinery could have been simplified,43 if the design intent had been to produce only fuels. 

Physical property specifications on products must be considered. In refineries the vapor pressure or octane level of fuel products must satisfy some specification. For blends of various products, you usually assume that a composite property can be calculated through the averaging of pure component physical properties. For N components with physical property values Vt and volume fraction yi9 the average property V is... 

The refinery uses three primary processes in converting crude oil into these varied fuel products separation, conversion, and treatment. 

Economic analysis performed for refineries in certain markets have calculated that the benefit of being able to increase kerosene and jet fuel production yield was an improvement of 3-6 cents per barrel over previous operational conditions. On an 180000 barrel per day crude unit this equates to a benefit of 2000000-4000000 per year. Several other refiners are utilizing NMR analyzers on the feed and products of crude units for control and optimization, AGIP has an NMR analyzer for monitoring the feed. 

The use of catalysts for exploiting renewable energy sources, producing clean fuels in refineries, and minimizing the by-product formation in industry also fall within the definition of environmental catalysis. In the future, the continuous effort to control transport emissions, improve indoor ah quality, and decontaminate polluted water and soil will further boost catalytic technology. All in all, catalysts will continue to be a valuable asset in the effort to protect human health, the natural environment, and the existence of life on Earth. 

Visbreaking is a mild thermal pyrolysis of heavy petroleum fractions whose object is to reduce fuel production in a refinery and to make some gasoline. 

It is generally recognized that the higher the hydrogen content of a petroleum product, especially the fuel products, the better is the quality of the product (Dol-bear, 1997). This knowledge has stimulated the use of hydrogen-addition processes in the refinery. 

A brief outline of the products expected in a demonstration plant and in future commercial plants is shown in Figure 2. In future commercial plants, for example, ethane and propane could be utilized as chemical intermediates and naphtha as a source of chemicals or for production of high-octane unleaded gasoline. Synthesis gas produced in excess of the requirements for hydrogen could be utilized as a source of chemicals as well as a fuel. The fuel oil could be selectively fractionated to produce a middle distillate for use as turbine fuel, light industrial boiler fuel or refinery feedstocks, while the heavy distillate could serve as a fuel oil for large utility boilers. 

Hallale, N. and F. Liu, Efficient Refinery Hydrogen Management for Clean Fuels Production, presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting, Los Angeles (2000). 

Figure 1.1.17 The solar refinery as the conceptual contribution of chemistry by chemical energy conversion to the sustainable use of renewable energy. The upstream part (hydrogen generation) and the downstream parts need not to be colocalized in a practical realization. CSP stands for concentrated solar power. Green boxes indicate solar fuel products blue boxes stand for intermediate platform chemicals. The red arrows indicate flows of solar hydrogen to a storage and transport system for large-scale applications. The blue arrows show the major application lines for chemical production of solar fuels. The scheme also indicates the role of fertilizers from ammonia required in sustained use of biomass for energetic applications.

Refining is considered a dirty processing effort. Product separation of refined product streams is not as clean as efforts to process petrochemicals. Refiners have the flexibility to blend final fuel products. Thus, there is no exact recipe used by all refiners to produce consumer products. Multiple crude oils are processed and then blended to meet consumer fuel product specifications. Table 18.1 lists the refining streams that are blended to produce consumer products. The consumer products are familiar. However, within a refinery these products are blended from portions of crude oil fractions from the listed reforming process units. To complicate the situation further, not all refineries are configured identically. Many different processing operations can be used to refine and separate product streams to blend the products listed in Table 18.1. 

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