Thermal Treatment for Decreasing the Acidity of Crude Oil

Highly acidic crude oil is thermally soaked to investigate how the temperature and time involved affect the removal of organic acid in feedstock. Experimental results indicate that thermal treatment is an effective approach to decreasing acidity and the acid removal rate reaches 80%. Temperature is one of the main factors that determine the acid removal reaction. When the temperature ranges from 420oC to 440oC, the acid removal rate increases with the rise of the reaction temperature, but the increase slows down gradually. At the reaction temperature below 440oC, the long reaction time favors the acid removal. The cracking and polymerization of hydrocarbon molecules take place so that the properties of the crude oil change at the same time when the highly acidic crude is thermally treated.

Heavy Crude Oil Upgrading: Jazmin Crude

The Jazmin crude oil is located at the heart of Middle Magdalena in Colombia. It is heavy and sour crude oil with 43 wt.% of vacuum bottoms. It cannot be processed at the conventional refinery without being mixed with other lighter crudes, and should be upgraded to produce synthetic crude with higher concentration of distillates and lower acidity and carbon content. In this paper eight upgrading alternatives are presented. The alternatives include the processing of the crude, reduced crude and vacuum bottoms of the Jazmin crude oil using the following technologies: Distillation, solvent deasphalting, visbreaking, Delayed Coking, and Hydrotreating. The experiments were conducted at pilot scale, and there were used standard analysis techniques such as ASTM. In this study it was found that Jazmine crude oil and its heavy components produce high distillate yields when they were processed with thermal conversion processes. In addition those processes reduce the products acidity. Within the analyzed scheme the one corresponding to the visbreaking of the crude oil and the Delayed Coking of the vacuum bottoms from the visbreaking is perhaps the most attractive, giving 5.9 wt.% of gas, 78.2 wt.% of distillates and 15.9 wt.% of coke.

Visbreaking of heavy petroleum oil catalyzed by SO_(4)^(2-)/ZrO_(2)solid super-acid doped with Ni^(2+) or Sn^(2+)

SO_(4)^(2-)/ZrO_(2) solid super-acid catalysts(SZ)doped with Ni^(2+)or Sn^(2+)(Ni^(2+)/SZ,Sn^(2+)/SZ)were prepared for catalytic visbreaking of heavy petroleum oil from Shengli oil field.The visbreaking reactions were carried out at 240uC and 3–4 MPa for 24 h using a heavy petroleum oil to catalyst mass ratio of 100:0.05.The effect of water content on viscosity of heavy petroleum oil was also investigated.Both catalysts can promote thermolysis of heavy petroleum oil and the viscosity was reduced from 0.319 Pa·s to 0.135 Pa?s for Ni^(2+)/SZ and 0.163 Pa·s for(Sn^(2+)/SZ)with visbreaking rates of 57.7% and 48.9%,respectively.After visbreaking,the saturated hydrocarbon content increased while aromatics,resin,asphaltene,sulfur and nitrogen content decreased.The presence of water was disadvantageous to visbreaking of heavy petroleum oil.