Catalytic Upgrading of SRC-II Syncrude

Abstract

Chevron Research Company, under a contract sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is conducting a program to determine the feasibility and estimate the costs of using modern petroleum processing technology to produce distillate fuels, such as high octane gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel, from a number of synthetic crude feedstocks. Pilot plant tests for the key processing steps are being conducted to the extent needed to make reasonable estimates of commercial plant performance.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. It was concluded that shale oil can be refined to high quality transportation fuels via modern state-of-the-art refining technology and that it can serve as a substitute for crude oil in a refinery equipped with modern hydrotreating facilities. The key to successful shale oil refining is the initial hydrotreating step which removes contaminants (nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen, olefins, and metallic contaminants) and permits the use of conventional conversion and refining processes to make finished products.This chapter reports results of a similar study to determine the feasibility of converting solvent refined coal (SRC) to transportation fuels. The next chapter discusses upgrading of H-Coal process products.The SRC process, in its two forms, is one of the major processes under current study in programs sponsored by the DOE for conversion of coal to either (1) a solid deashed low sulfur product or (2) a low boiling liquid.In the original SRC process (6), now designated as SRC-I, coal is dissolved under moderate hydrogen pressure in an

Assessment of coal liquids as refinery feedstocks

“…Some data are compiled in Table 32. If severity is high enough, ali the heteroatoms can eventually be removed to beyond the detection of certain analytical techniques, most of the aromatics can be hydrogenated, and the product is water-white in appearance [143].…”