Experimental studies have been conducted on the co-hydroprocessing of canola oil−heavy vacuum gas oil (HVGO) blends with different blending ratios under typical hydroprocessing conditions. It was found that the HVGO−canola oil blend feeds had higher conversion to light product than the pure HVGO feed at similar operating conditions. However, the hydrodesulfurization (HDS) and hydrodenitrogenation (HDN) were not affected by the addition of canola oil into the HVGO. Under similar conversion or light product yield, coprocessing HVGO−canola oil blends required lower temperature and/or pressure than hydroprocessing the pure HVGO, an implication of potential energy saving. It was also found that at the same conversion, the HVGO−canola oil blends generated more diesel but less gasoline than pure HVGO, an effective way to meet the fast increasing diesel demand.
In
this study, 20 diesel fractions were obtained by co-hydroprocessing
blends of low-grade canola oil and Canadian oil sand bitumen-derived
heavy vacuum gas oil (HVGO) at different canola oil/HVGO blending
ratios, reaction temperatures and pressures, and liquid hourly space
velocities. A commercial hydroprocessing catalyst was used in the
experiments under typical commercial operating conditions. The obtained
diesel fractions were fully characterized by using standard ASTM methods
and advanced two-dimensional gas chromatography. Characterization
results of the diesel fractions showed that, with the increased canola
oil content in the feed blends, the contents of aromatics and cycloparaffins
decreased and the content of isoparaffins remained relatively constant.
In contrast, the content of normal paraffins (n-paraffins) increased. The observed increase in the n-paraffins in the diesel fractions was attributed to the
hydrodeoxygenation and hydrodecarboxylation of triglycerides in the
canola oil. The n-paraffins in the diesel were mostly n-heptadecane (product of hydrodecarboxylation) and n-octadecane (product of hydrodeoxygenation) with traces
of other lighter or heavier n-paraffins. The formation
of n-heptadecane and n-octadecane
resulted in improved physical and combustion properties of the diesel
fractions, such as density, boiling point distribution, and cetane
index/number.
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