The Petroleum Refinery

Many chemical products are produced from crude oil. Initially, little chemistry was involved therefore the petrochemicals were not considered part of the chemical process industry. Today, materials ranging from specialised fuels, plastics and synthetics makes it part of the chemical processing, The petroleum refinery is where the chemical processing of oil begins. 

Landfill leachate or gas condensate derived from listed waste. Landfill leachate and landfill gas condensate derived from previously disposed wastes that now meet the listing description of one or more of the petroleum refinery listed wastes would be regulated as a listed hazardous waste. However, U.S. EPA temporarily excluded such landfill leachate and gas condensate from the definition of hazardous waste provided their discharge is regulated under the CWA. The exclusion will remain effective while U.S. EPA studies how the landfill leachate and landfill gas condensate are currently managed, and the effect of future CWA effluent limitation guidelines for landfill wastewaters. 

Part 1, comprised of one chapter, introduces the reader to the configuration of petroleum refining and the petrochemical industry. It also discusses key classifications of petrochemical industry feedstock from petroleum products. The final part explains and proposes possible synergies between the petroleum refinery and the petrochemical industry. 

The remainder of Chapter 5 is organized as follows. In Section 5.2, we explain the problem statement of the petroleum refinery and petrochemical integration. Then, we discuss the proposed model formulation in Section 5.3. In Section 5.4, we illustrate the performance of the model through an industrial-scale case study. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks in Section 5.5. 

Before we develop the equations for dealing with multiple-reaction systems, we consider a very important reaction system that is the largest and most important petrochemical process outside the petroleum refinery, the olefins industry. 

We have encountered many of these reactor types in previous chapters. In Chapter 2 all the reactors in the petroleum refinery were seen to be multiphase, and we will close this chapter by returning to the reactors of the petroleum refinery to see if we can now understand how they operate in a bit more detail. 

While we promised in Chapter 2 that we would finally explain the details of aU these complicated reactors that are essential in the petroleum refinery, we will in fact not even try to do this because their details are actually much more complicated than can be considered in a simple or short fashion. (Many books and monographs have been written on each of these reactors.) Rather, we shall conclude by remarking that throughout this book we have considered all the principles by which one would describe the reactors in a petroleum refinery. 

Fuel. With a heating value of 15,300 to 16,400 B.t.u. per pound, petroleum coke is an excellent fuel (30). Of the 3,392,000 tons produced during 1949 approximately 60% (over 2,000,000 tons) was used as fuel. In 1928 approximately 80% of the 1,300,000 tons produced was used as fuel—most of it by the petroleum refineries themselves (16). 

Many of the petroleum refinery operations involve isomerization of hydrocarbons as part of the complex chemistry taking place (see Chapter 2). 

Solvent deasphalting (Chang and Murphy, 1992 Van Tine and Feintuch, 1997) provides an extension to vacuum distillation and is a later addition to the petroleum refinery. Before its use, many processes capable of removing asphaltic materials from feedstocks were employed in the form of distillation (atmospheric and vacuum), as well as clay and sulfuric acid treatment. 

The most basic raw petrochemical materials are liquefied petroleum gas, natural gas, gas from cracking operations, liquid distillate (C4 to C6), distillate from special cracking processes, and selected or isomerized cyclic fractions for aromatics. Mixtures are usually separated into their components at the petroleum refineries, then chemically converted into reactive precursors before being converted into salable chemicals within the plant. 

Independent chemical companies own and operate most of the sulfuric acid plants. Plant capacities are generally in the range of 500-1500 tons fresh sulfuric acid/day. However, a number of acid plants are installed within, or immediately adjacent to, the petroleum refinery area most of these acid... 

Distillation in the petroleum refinery is different from most distillation operations in two principal ways ... 

Production of cresols and xylenols from spent caustic washes of the petroleum refineries has been confined mostly to the Untied States since cresolates feedstocks have been inadequate in other countries. Besides as a result of use of UOP s Merox process of sweetening which does not use NaOH solution, or of hydrotreating process, less and less cresols... 

Mixed cresols, also known as cresylic acids, the lowest among the alkyl phenols, were primarily produced as by-products from coal carbonization plants or recovered from the petroleum refinery caustic washes. These cresols obtained from natural sources were known to the chemical industry for the last 75 years and had limited uses. Production of synthetic cresols from toluene opened up new avenues for these products... 

In 1987, Total owned the hydrocarbon assets held by TIPCO in the United States, as well as those of FRANCAREP ITALIA. In the same year, Total owned the petroleum refinery at Denver in the United States. 

The petroleum prepared at the oil well comes to the petroleum refinery and the first process at modern refineries (excluding the refineries working only with non-conventional feed) is atmospheric rectification. The first refinery, which was opened in 1861, produced only kerosene and this was possible by using simple atmospheric distillation alone. The by-products of this refinery included tar and naphtha. For the next thirty years, kerosene still remained the main product that consumers wanted. Two significant events changed this situation ... 

Petroleum refinery hazards are those hazards that are covered by the Petroleum Refinery Process Safety Management National Emphasis Program (See CPL 03-00-004) and hazards dne to the potential release of a highly hazardous chemical as covered by the PSM Covered Chemical Facilities National Emphasis Program See Instrnction 09-06 (CPL 02) ... 

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