Paraho process

UNISHALE B. The UNISHALE process, like the Paraho process, uses lump feed and countercurrent flows, and can be operated ia either the DH or IH mode. The UNISHALE B process is an IH process that uses hot recycled gas as the heat-transport medium (Fig. 6). The unique feature of the UNISHALE processes is the rock pump. The soflds move upward through the retort as the vapors are moving downward. The rock pump was used ia the UNISHALE technology at Parachute, Colorado to produce more than 0.64 x 10 m (four million battels) of cmde shale oil. Operations were shut down in 1991. 

Paraho [Para homem, Portuguese, for mankind ] A process for making oil and gas from oil shale. Development began in 1971 by the Paraho Development Corporation at Grand Junction, CO. Since then, in conjunction with a variety of American companies and agencies, a number of pilot plants have been operated and plants designed. 

The first feedstock studied under this contract was Paraho shale oil. In a series of recent papers (1-4) and a DOE report (5 ), three basic shale oil processing routes for the production of transportation fuels were studied hydrotreating followed by hydrocracking, hydrotreating followed by fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), and severe coking followed by hydrotreating. 

C. E. and Frumkin, H. A., "Refining and Upgrading of Synfuels from Coal and Oil Shales by Advanced Catalytic Processes, First Interim Report, Processing of Paraho Shale Oil," DOE Report No. FE-2315-25, April 1978. 

In this chapter we will describe some of our initial evaluation work on Paraho shale oil. This initial evaluation was not performed in depth rather, this first step consisted of chemical characterizations and high-spot, bench-scale processing of oil shale and several other syncrudes for direct comparisons of chemical feedstocks potential. Conventional analytical and petroleum processing techniques were used in the expectation that these would provide reference data on which to base specifically adapted techniques for evaluations of individual syncrudes. The results represent only our first attempts and except for occasional comparisons, are only for Paraho shale oil. 

The TOSCO-II process is capital intensive because it requires a large volume of heating gases and mechanically complex equipment the PARAHO and Union processes are also capital intensive because they have long residence time requirements that entail massive hardware. The PARAHO and Union processes are, however, heat efficient as a result of countercurrent shale and gas flow. But the TOSCO process, although having some degree of heat recovery, uses heat relatively inefficiently. 

Although the nature of retorted shale certainly depends upon the nature of the geological deposit from which the raw oil shale was mined, it depends, to a large extent, also upon the retorting technology used to process the raw oil shale. The information presented in this paper is obtained from the Paraho Oil Shale Demonstration carried out from 1973 to 1976 Cl). 

The Paraho semi-works retort is a cylindrical vessel, having a 2.5 m internal diameter and is capable of processing about 250-300 tonnes of raw oil shale per day. A schematic of the Paraho direct mode operations is shown in Figure 1. Raw shale, crushed and screened to +1.0 cm to -10.0 cm, enters the top of the retort, passes through the retort under the influence... 

Most of the material used in the retorted shale disposal research was produced by the Paraho semi-works retort operating in the direct mode operation. Another mode of operation, an indirect mode, was also studied. In the indirect mode, air is not introduced into the retort. Internal combustion does not occur none of the organic carbon remaining on the retorted shale is utilized. Process heat for the indirect mode operation is supplied by heating the recycle gas in an external heater. 

Paraho Environmental Data Part I, Process Characterization Part II, Air Quality Part III, Water Quality," U. S. Department of Energy, DOE/EV 0086, UC-66e 91, 1980. 

Shale-I. Data for a tSir9 JP-5 sample, a ten gallon quantity produced by fractionation of Paraho shale crude followed by 1200 psi catalytic hydrogenation of the jet fuel cut (9), is also shown in Table III. Again this fuel has a distinctly different FIMS fingerprint in response to the refining process used. 

The shale derived fuels used in these studies were derived from Paraho crude shale oil. The fuels were prepared by hydrocracking of the total crude, and then fractionation. Both the JP-5 and DEM Shale-II fuels were acid and clay treated in final finishing steps. The refining process which was used is described elsewhere (7). 

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