Natural gasoline, petroleum refining process

Process Stream Separations. Differences in adsorptivity between gases provides a means for separating components in industrial process gas streams. Activated carbon in fixed beds has been used to separate aromatic compounds from lighter vapors in petroleum refining process streams (105) and to recover gasoline components from natural and manufactured gas (106,107). 

Application of fluidized catalyst techniques to the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (30) has yielded a process that produces chiefly (about 70%) motor gasoline, with minor amounts (about 30%) of fuel oil and oxygenated compounds. The fluidized iron catalyst process is outstanding because of its very high space-time yield and because it may be competitive with existing petroleum production and refining processes, if natural gas at 10 cents or less per 1000 cubic feet is available as the raw material for synthesis gas production. 

Bitumen describes a black or dark brown masticlike material that is thermoplastic in nature and softens upon heating. The sources of bitumen are petroleum or coal deposits. The natural product is commonly called gilsonite or pitch, a mineral formed by an old weathered petroleum flow at the surface of the earth that has left behind the larger molecules from the petroleum. A principal source in the past has been Lake Trinidad, a 445,000 m2 deposit on the island of Trinidad. Bitumen from petroleum or crude oil is called asphalt (qv). It is the material left behind after all the valuable compounds, eg, gasolines, have been distilled out of the cmde oil. The amount and quality of asphalt is dependent on the source of the crude oil used in the refining process. Some cmde oils have a higher content of asphaltic bitumen left after the distillation process. Bitumen from coal is coal-tar pitch. It remains after the valuable coal oils and tars have been distilled out of the coal tars produced by distractive distillation. Most industrial applications for bitumen products use asphalt or coal-tar pitch because the supply is more uniform and plentiful. 

There are numerous refining methods employed to extract the fractions of petroleum liquids and gases. A particular refinery process design is normally dependent on the raw feedstock characteristics (e.g., crude oil and produced gas natural specifications) and the market demands (e.g., aviation or automotive gasolines), which it intends to meet. 

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