Processed-engineered fuels production

The chemical industry represents a 455-billion-dollar-a-year business, with products ranging from cosmetics, to fuel products, to plastics, to pharmaceuticals, health care products, food additives, and many others. It is diverse and dynamic, with market sectors rapidly expanding, and in turmoil in many parts of the world. Across these varied industry sectors, basic unit operations and equipment are applied on a daily basis, and indeed although there have been major technological innovations to processes, many pieces of equipment are based upon a foundation of engineering principles developed more than 50 years ago. 

The current trend throughout the refining industry is to produce more fuel products from each barrel of petroleum and to process those products in different ways to meet product specifications for use in various (automobile, diesel, aircraft, and marine) engines. Overall, the demand for liquid fuels has expanded rapidly and demand has developed for gas oils and fuels for domestic central heating and fuel oil for power generation, as well as for hght distillates and other inputs, derived from crude oil, for the petrochemical industries. 

The industrial processes for hydrogen production are well established [9, 30, 31], but may not be appropriate for small-scale stationary applications such as residential fuel cells or for unattended operation such as on-site hydrogen generation. These new applications allow for new process designs based on catalyst and engineering improvements [10, 32]. Hence a study of the ATR process has to involve both chemical and engineering aspects. 

This process has evolved considerably from the start of the Iron Age, when our amateur engineer ancestors developed batch processes, through the continuous processes that fueled the Industrial Revolution, down to the twentieth century, where specialty steels are the desired products. As might be expected, these processes evolved primarily by trial-and-error methods, because no detailed analysis of reactor flows and reactions are productive or even possible. 

The production of various half-finished products of petrochemical synthesis and liquid fuels from natural gas is the most important objective connected with the crude oil economy and the creation of highly effective chemical engineering processes. In this connection, investigations performed by the Sandra National Laboratory (USA) are of special interest. This company designs enzyme mimics for catalytic activation of low-molecular gaseous alkanes in liquid fuel production [74], Two directions of their activity should be outlined ... 

Another important factor that distinguishes this separation is that it is not environmentally or economically feasible to simply return a rejected stream to the environment, as in a typical aqueous RO process where the brine can be returned to the ocean. The federal regulations mandate that C02 emissions from refineries and chemical plants be reduced to low levels therefore, facilities can no longer afford to dispose of waste hydrocarbon streams in their flare systems. Pure streams from polyolefin reactors and vents from polymer-storage facilities, which were once flared, must be redirected to recovery systems. To reduce the economic penalty of environmental compliance, these paraffin and olefin mixtures must be recovered and recycled. In other words, two products must be made, a useful fuel and a useful chemical product, hence more process engineering is required in order to achieve such an objective. 

Methanol production today is not a sustainable process but is part of a petrochemical route for conversion of fossil carbon into chemicals and fuels (see Section 5.3.3). It has to be emphasized that a one-to-one upscaling of existing industrial methanol synthesis capacities for fuel production is not useful. This is mainly because the current industrial process has not been developed and optimized under the boundary conditions of conversion of anthropogenic C02, but rather for synthesis gas feeds derived from fossil sources such as natural gas or coal. The switch to an efficient large-scale methanol synthesis with a neutral C02 footprint is still a major scientific and engineering challenge, and further research and catalyst and process optimization is urgently needed to realize the idea of a sustainable methanol economy. ... 

Liquid hydrocarbons are considered to be the most valuable products of a potential recycling process as they can be used as blends for motor engine fuels. In such a process short-chain hydrocarbons in the gas phase are also produced and they are crucial to provide the heat needed for an endothermic reaction such as polymer cracking, bnt their value is considered low due to their transportation cost. 

Pyrolysis oil in principal can be used as feedstock for processes in chemical production and as fuel for burners (similar to fossil oil burners), for special Diesel engines and for gas turbines etc. In this paper the use as fuel for Diesel engines is selected, as at the moment it seems to be the most promising way for economical reasons. 

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